[libvirt-users] busy loop in libvirtd (cpu usage 100%)

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Fri, Dec 03, 2010 at 04:58:23AM -0600, Igor Serebryany wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> 	Occasionally of late, I've seen a few cases where libvirtd cpu usage
> 	shoots up to 100% and stays there indefinitely. This seems to happen
> 	when a QEMU VM is starting up, although on one occasion I *think* I
> 	saw it happen after a QEMU VM was p2p-migrated. 
> 
> 	Doing strace -f -p <libvirtd pid> reveals a flood of poll() functions calls
> 	like these: 
> 
> [pid  1690] poll([{fd=3, events=POLLIN}, {fd=6, events=POLLIN}, {fd=12, events=POLLIN|POLLERR|POLLHUP}, {fd=11, events=POLLIN|POLLERR|POLLHUP}, {fd=10, events=POLLIN|POLLERR|POLLHUP}, {fd=9, events=POLLIN|POLLERR|POLLHUP}, {fd=24, events=POLLIN|POLLERR|POLLHUP}, {fd=21, events=POLLOUT}, {fd=14, events=POLLIN}, {fd=15, events=POLLIN}, {fd=16, events=POLLIN}, {fd=17, events=POLLIN}, {fd=21, events=POLLIN|POLLERR|POLLHUP}, {fd=20, events=POLLIN|POLLERR|POLLHUP}], 14, -1) = 1 ([{fd=21, revents=POLLOUT}])
> 
> 	It seems that because 1 is returned each time, libvirtd just goes
> 	crazy dealing with fd-3, but I have no idea what fd-3 is.
> 
> 	Restarting libvirtd fixes the high load, and then everything just
> 	goes back to chugging along as usual.
> 
> 	This is on libvirt 0.8.5 with qemu 0.12.5 on a debian Squeeze system
> 	(the libvirt is compiled by hand).
> 
> 	I'm not sure what's causing it, whether it's a bug in my own code
> 	somehow or inside libvirtd. I'd appreciate some help on how to debug
> 	this problem further -- restarting libvirtd is kind of a pain for
> 	me, because my application, which monitors the health on the node,
> 	maintains open connections to 'qemu:///system' and would thus have
> 	to restart itself as well...

This is the kind of problem you need to use GDB to diagnose. Install
the libvirt-debuginfo (or equivalent for non-Fedora), and attach to
the libvirt process. Then do

  print eventLoop.handleCount
  print eventLoop.handles[0]
  print eventLoop.handles[1]
  print eventLoop.handles[2]
  ...

Until you find the one with fd=21 in it. We're looking for the name
of the function callback associated with this fd, which GDB should
have print out each time.

Daniel