Category: Server Management

How to: Find IOPS usage in a Linux Server

Question: How to find iops usage of a linux server?

Answer: Use iostat. Iostat is a tool comes with the ‘sysstat’ package. If you type iostat on your CentOS/Redhat server and it says the command not found, you can install sysstat to avail the iostat command.

yum install -y sysstat

An example iostat usage case could as simple as following:

iostat -x 1

-x tells iostat to give extended statistics which is required to find read/write iops individually. And the 1 tells iostat to repeat the command every 1s.

An example output would be like the following:

If you look at the output, the colum r/s would say the read iops and the colum w/s would say write iops. If you are using simple ‘iostat 1’ then the column tps should show the total iops of the disk in use.

If you are using a spinning disk, and if you are getting anything around 150-200 cumulatively, you are probably hitting the iops limit. With raid, the number would change according to your raid choice. Although, the number can increase in case of using Writeback SSD Cache, Hardware RAID Cache or Pure SSD disks. Most important benefit of using SSD is not essentially the amount of throughput it gives in a practical environment instead the amount of IOPS it can sustain is phenomenal.

Quick How To: Finding IO Abuser in KVM VM

I thought to write a quick how to on finding an abuser in a KVM VM Host. There is a tool shipped with libvirt is called ‘virt-top’. Virt-top  has many usage case. It can be used to detect the IO Abuser. Most of the cases, you would see the abuser is throwing a lot of IO Requests regardless of the amount of IO being written or read. Which is why, it important to first identify if you are hitting the IOPS limit of your disk or not by using iostat. A common tool I regularly use to identify first hand disk problem is iotop as well. The following is the favorite iotop command:

iotop -oaP

-o will only show the threads that are actually doing IO in the server instead of all the sleeping threads, keeping the iotop result clean. ‘P’ will show only the processes instead of every single threads. Each VM can have thousands of threads which will show up on the process ID. ‘a’ is specifically my favorite, that does accumulated output. It will show you the sum of the usage for the time your interactive iotop is running.

Once you are done with the first hand investigation, you may now use virt-top to detect the VM activity further. A most used command for me to detect IO abuser is the following:

virt-top -3 –block-in-bytes -o blockwrrq

-3 tells the virt-top to find block device usage and find them by ‘bytes’ while the -o ‘blockwrrq’ means to sort the output by the write iops of the VM. You can use blockrdrq to sort the result by read iops too.

Once you can mix the output of virt-top and iotop results, you shouldn’t have difficulty to detect the VM that is abusing the IO on the server.

How to Enable TXT Record Addition/Edition in Cpanel

By default, if you are trying to add TXT record from cpanel, you would probably see a screen like the following

It doesn’t show the option to add TXT record. Basically, cpanel won’t allow the cpanel users to add TXT record with Simple DNS Zone Editor permission. It allows adding A, CNAME & MX record with that feature/permission set. To add permission to add TXT record and other, you need to enable Advanced DNS Zone Editor for the user’s feature list. If the user is under default list, go to root WHM >> Feature Manager >> Edit Default Feature list and enable Advanced DNS Zone Editor as following:

What is Kondemand? Why do I see a lot of Kondemand process in my process list?

Question: What is Kondemand? Why do I see a lot of Kondemand process in my process list?

Answer: Kondemand is the process used for automatic CPU scaling on multi core linux system. It automatically reduce/drops the CPU clock speed to power usage when the CPU is not in use. This is done through scaling_governor available on linux. To see if your scaling_governor is set to ‘ondemand’ or not, you may use the following command:

# cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor

If your CPU is showing ‘ondemand’ scanling governor then the kondemand kernel process is active and will reduce your CPU clock speed on fly to reduce power usage. You can change this settings to performance on fly using the following small shell code:

for CPUFREQ in /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor; do [ -f $CPUFREQ ] || continue; echo -n performance > $CPUFREQ; done

There is a linux service called CPUSpeed, this can tune your scaling governor back to ondemand after the reboot. You may shut it down:

service cpuspeed stop
chkconfig off cpuspeed

You may check your CPU speed is restored to the original through the proc filesystem:

cat /proc/cpuinfo

Can you run fsck on a disk image or raw file?

Question: Can you run fsck on a disk image or raw file?

Answer: I believe you are referring to KVM disk image/raw files. It could be the disk image created from a dd clone. The answer yes, you can run fsck on a disk image. You can also use other fsck attribute as required as following:

fsck.ext4 -fyC /somefile.raw

Remember to use specific partition fsck binary, here, we have used ext4 binary for a ext4 file system loaded on the image file. Running badblock program on an image file can be bad. You may use -c (small c) to run badblock check with the fsck:

fsck.ext4 -C -fyc /somefile.raw

This sometimes create undesired results and not advisable.

Question: What other option do I have?

Answer: You can mount the image using loop back device and then run the file system check. This can be done using kpartx as described in this post: How to: Mount raw VM disk images (KVM/Xen/VMW)

Identifying File / Inode by Sector / Block Number in Linux

I had an interesting problem earlier today. While running r1soft backup, dmesg was throwing some I/O like the following:

Dec 28 09:28:43 ssd1 kernel: [36701.752626] end_request: I/O error, dev vda, sector 331781632
Dec 28 09:28:43 ssd1 kernel: [36701.755400] end_request: I/O error, dev vda, sector 331781760
Dec 28 09:28:43 ssd1 kernel: [36701.758286] end_request: I/O error, dev vda, sector 331781888
Dec 28 09:28:43 ssd1 kernel: [36701.760992] end_request: I/O error, dev vda, sector 331780864

They didn’t go out after multiple file system checks. That left me no choice other than finding what’s actually in that sector. I could see the sector numbers was increasing by 128 up 10 sequential logs. That makes to understand it could be a specific account causing the errors.

EXT file system comes with an interesting tool called debugfs. This can be used on mounted file system and can be used to track down IO related issues. Although, you require to do some calculation first to convert sector to block number of a specific partition before you can use debugfs.

The lowest sector number in the log was ‘331780864’. First I tracked down the partition where this sector lies. This can be done using fdisk -lu /dev/disk (Make sure to use -u, to ensure fdisk returns the sector numbers instead of cylinder number)

#fdisk -lu /dev/vda

Disk /dev/vda: 1342.2 GB, 1342177280000 bytes
16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 2600634 cylinders, total 2621440000 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0002f013

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/vda1 * 2048 411647 204800 83 Linux
/dev/vda2 411648 205211647 102400000 83 Linux
/dev/vda3 205211648 209307647 2048000 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/vda4 209307648 2621439999 1206066176 83 Linux

Now, find the Start Number < Our Sector number to detect which block contains our desired sector. In our case, it is /dev/vda4. Once done, we need to numeric sector number specifically for this partition, which can be done by subtracting our sector number with start number of the partition. In our case:

331780864 – 209307648 = 122473216

That means, our sector lies in 122473216th sector of /dev/vda4.

Now find the block size by tune2fs:

# tune2fs -l /dev/vda4 | grep Block
Block count: 301516544
Block size: 4096
Blocks per group: 32768

In our case, it is 4096.

Now determine the size of the sectors by bytes. This is shown in fdisk output:

Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes

From the two relations block/bytes and sector/bytes, find sector/block : 512 / 4096 = .125

Now, calculate the block number of 122473216th sector: 122473216 x .125 = 15309152

We can now use debugfs to determine what file we have on that block number as following:

debugfs /dev/vda4

On the debug prompt, type:

debugfs: icheck 15309152

Block   Inode number
15309152   2611435

This will show the inode number of the desired file. Use the inode number to run:

debugfs: ncheck 15309152

Inode   Pathname
15309152 /lost+found/#29938847

This will show you the desired file that is actually causing the issue. In my case, I could find files that were corrupted in some old fsck, were stored in lost+found and they were missing magic number/incomplete files. Once I had deleted all the files from lost+found, my issue was resolved. Viola!

[Tue Dec 19 20:40:07.097202 2017] [lsapi:error] [pid 532140:tid 139848266454784] [client IP.IP.IP.IP:25021] mod_lsapi: [host domain.com] [req GET / HTTP/1.1] Could not connect to lsphp backend: connect to lsphp refused: 111 (possibly memory limit for LVE ID 1789 too small), referer: domain.com

If you are running Cloudlinux, cagefs and lsapi with cpanel, you are probably familiar with the error. If the error is appearing for one or two sites, then it is probably because the user is hitting the VM/PM limit you have set through Cloudlinux. But if the error is appearing for all the sites, then it is because the cagefs fails with the suexec permission for some reason.

[Tue Dec 19 20:40:07.097202 2017] [lsapi:error] [pid 532140:tid 139848266454784] [client *:25021] mod_lsapi: [host *] [req GET / HTTP/1.1] Could not connect to lsphp backend: connect to lsphp refused: 111 (possibly memory limit for LVE ID 1789 too small), referer: http://*/

One way to solve the problem is to remount all the users. Sometimes, it doesn’t work and you may require to reinitialize cagefs again:

cagefsctl –remount-all
cagefsctl -r

I have seen times, when nothing works, but reinstalling cagefs does the trick. If cagefs doesn’t work, you may try disabling virtual memory from the CloudLinux LVE manager to see if that fix the problem. CloudLinux also has a known Virtual Memory 503 error issue with LSAPI.

error: Unable to create cgroup for vm**: No such file or directory

The error can appear for any type of KVM VM installation like Virtualizor  or SolusVM or Proxmox. You may face the same error if you are simply using virtmanager to manage your KVM installation. The error appear when you try to start/create the VM from the xml file:

[root@vps8 addvs]# virsh create /etc/libvirt/qemu/v1015.xml
error: Failed to create domain from /etc/libvirt/qemu/v1015.xml
error: Unable to create cgroup for v1015: No such file or directory

It appears because for some CentOS starts unmounting the cgroup and breaks libvirt. Easy way to fix this is to restart libvirtd:

service libvirtd restart

The error is more common in CentOS 7 than CentOS 6, as systemd is known to have the bug:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=678555

device-mapper: cache: You have created a cache device with a lot of individual cache blocks

The error would be similar to the following to be exact:

[172593.817178] device-mapper: cache: You have created a cache device with a lot of individual cache blocks (3276800)
[172593.817182] All these mappings can consume a lot of kernel memory, and take some time to read/write.
[172593.817185] Please consider increasing the cache block size to reduce the overall cache block count.

It usually appears because you have created a large cache pool, while using a small chunk size.

Here is what to be said about chunk size in lvmcache2 manual:

The size of data blocks managed by a cache pool can be specified with
the –chunksize option when the cache LV is created. The default
unit is KiB. The value must be a multiple of 32KiB between 32KiB and
1GiB.

Using a chunk size that is too large can result in wasteful use of
the cache, where small reads and writes can cause large sections of
an LV to be mapped into the cache. However, choosing a chunk size
that is too small can result in more overhead trying to manage the
numerous chunks that become mapped into the cache. Overhead can
include both excessive CPU time searching for chunks, and excessive
memory tracking chunks.

Basically chunk size is determining the block size at which your caches are going to be stored. To find your current chunk size run:

lvs -o+chunksize vgname/cachevolumename

Should return something like the following:

#lvs -o+chunksize vg0/newvz
LV VG Attr LSize Pool Origin Data% Meta% Move Log Cpy%Sync Convert Chunk
newvz vg0 Cwi-aoC— 1.50t [cache] 14.14 0.75 5.12 64.00k

A good chunk size for a large cache device of size 200GB+ would be 256k. You may set the chunk size while setting up the device :

lvcreate –type cache-pool –chunksize 256K -L CacheSize -n CachePoolLV VG FastPVs

Backing up LVM Cache Volume?

I have been trying to explore what options do we have to use SSD Cache with a HDD driven servers to create faster writes. There are both software and hardware solutions. Hardware solution comes to CacheCade which isn’t really costly at all (roughly costs 250$ extra per license), though I was interested to explore all the software solution that are currently available in the market.

There are bcache, flashcache & lvm cache, that are mostly used in production servers. I firstly discarded bcache because it requires you to format the disk with bcache, that triggers the less flexibility check for a module. I tried flashcache before, and don’t want to go with it in a production server any longer as the module is discontinued (It still works, don’t get me wrong). All it seems, lvm cache is the only one which is stable and going to improve over days.

LVM Cache does work great. With the smq lvm cache policy, writeback cachemode & deadline scheduler, you can reach 220MBps write speed with Intel SSD in RAID 1, which is normally available in a RAID 1 Intel SSD. You can double the speed by putting a RAID 10 SSD array to back the cache. Although, after all the test was done, I realized that lvm cache doesn’t support snapshot unfortunately. At least not yet, at the time I am writing the blog. Without the snapshot facility, the performance benchmark actually goes in vain.

Snapshots of cache type volume vg0/newvz is not supported.

Hardware solutions are always useful as the backend setup goes transparent to the OS, which allows us to use our own tool without worrying about the caching setup. Cachecade is probably the only available solution right now with all facilities for SSD cache in production servers.