tree 564d0a557c1ce55db9016270c3266fb95a9c30f6
parent ddaf68200a485ae9605a397372b5d59f4dfba759
author Russ Cox <rsc@golang.org> 1663876047 -0400
committer Gopher Robot <gobot@golang.org> 1663895223 +0000

runtime/pprof: force use of 4-column profiles in pprof memprofile output

Pprof's converter from legacy text format to protobuf format
assumes that if the alloc and inuse stats are equal, then what's
really going on is that the program makes no distinction, and it
reads them as a two-column profile: objects and bytes.

Most of the time, some sampled object has been freed, and alloc != inuse.
In that case, pprof reads the profile as a four-column profile, with
alloc_objects, alloc_bytes, inuse_objects, inuse_bytes.

The 2-column form causes problems in a few ways. One is that if
you are reading the proto form and expect samples with the 4-column
names, they're not there. Another is that pprof's profile merger insists
on having the same number of columns and same names. This means
that

	pprof *.memprofile

works most of the time but fails if one of the memory profiles hit
the unlikely condition that alloc == inuse, since now its converted
form differs from the others.

Most programs should simply not be using this output form at all,
but cmd/compile and cmd/link still do, because x/tools/cmd/compilebench
reads some extra values from the text form that we have not yet added
to the proto form.

For the programs still writing this form, the easiest way to avoid the
column collapse issues is to ensure that the header never reports
alloc == inuse. The actual values in the header are ignored by pprof now,
except for the equality check (they should sum to the other values in the
file, so they are technically redundant). Because the actual values are not
used except for the equality check, we could hard-code different values
like 0 and 1, but just in case, to break as little as possible, this CL only
adjusts the values when they would otherwise be equal. In that case it
adds 1 to allocBytes. For most profiles, where alloc != inuse already, there
is no effect at all.

Change-Id: Ia563e402573d0f6eb81ae496645db27c08f9fe31
Reviewed-on: https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/go/+/432758
Reviewed-by: David Chase <drchase@google.com>
TryBot-Result: Gopher Robot <gobot@golang.org>
Auto-Submit: Russ Cox <rsc@golang.org>
Run-TryBot: Russ Cox <rsc@golang.org>