GNU Make only uses 4 threads no matter what --jobs is - docker

Whatever --jobs argument I pass to make, I'm always getting 4 threads.
During make --jobs=1 target I can see on stdout lines that start with make[1]:, make[2]:, make[3]: and make[4]: when I would only expect a single thread.
Same outcome if i use make --jobs=100 target, I get 4 threads instead of 100.
I'm not sure if that is relevant, but I run make inside a docker container and docker has 7 of my localhost cores available to it.
>docker info
Operating System: Docker Desktop
OSType: linux
Architecture: x86_64
CPUs: 7
and inside the Alpine Linux docker container
>make --version
GNU Make 4.2.1
Built for x86_64-alpine-linux-musl
>grep -c ^processor /proc/cpuinfo
7
confirming that the container gets 7 cores.
Is there something I could run that would help me narrow down why make behaves that way?

I think there's some confusion: the number after make is not a thread number. Make is not actually multithreaded, it's single-threaded.
That number is the depth of recursive make processes which are being invoked. It will always show up exactly the same (given the same targets) no matter how large (or small) your -j value, because it represents how many recursive instances of make have been invoked.
That is, if you have something like:
recurse:
$(MAKE) ...
then messages from the top-level instance of make will be make, and messages from the sub-make invoked by the recurse recipe will be make[1], etc.

Related

Optimizing of Opengrok on large base

i have a server instance here with 4 Cores and 32 GB RAM and Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS installed. On this machine there is an opengrok-instance running as docker container.
Inside of the docker container it uses AdoptOpenJDK:
OpenJDK Runtime Environment AdoptOpenJDK-11.0.11+9 (build 11.0.11+9)
Eclipse OpenJ9 VM AdoptOpenJDK-11.0.11+9 (build openj9-0.26.0, JRE 11 Linux amd64-64-Bit Compressed References 20210421_975 (JIT enabled, AOT enabled)
OpenJ9 - b4cc246d9
OMR - 162e6f729
JCL - 7796c80419 based on jdk-11.0.11+9)
The code-base that the opengrok-indexer scans is 320 GB big and tooks 21 hours.
What i am figured is out was, that i've am disable the history-option it tooks lesser time. Is there a possibility to reduce this time, if the history-flag is set.
Here are my index-command:
opengrok-indexer -J=-Djava.util.logging.manager=org.apache.juli.ClassLoaderLogManager -J=-Djava.util.logging.config.file=/usr/share/tomcat10/conf/logging.properties -J=-XX:-UseGCOverheadLimit -J=-Xmx30G -J=-Xms30G -J=-server -a /var/opengrok/dist/lib/opengrok.jar -- -R /var/opengrok/etc/read-only.xml -m 256 -c /usr/bin/ctags -s /var/opengrok/src/ -d /var/opengrok/data --remote on -H -P -S -G -W /var/opengrok/etc/configuration.xml --progress -v -O on -T 3 --assignTags --search --remote on -i *.so -i *.o -i *.a -i *.class -i *.jar -i *.apk -i *.tar -i *.bz2 -i *.gz -i *.obj -i *.zip"
Thank you for your help in advance.
Kind Regards
Siegfried
You should try to increase the number of threads using the following options:
--historyThreads number
The number of threads to use for history cache generation on repository level. By default the number of threads will be set to the number of available CPUs.
Assumes -H/--history.
--historyFileThreads number
The number of threads to use for history cache generation when dealing with individual files.
By default the number of threads will be set to the number of available CPUs.
Assumes -H/--history.
-T, --threads number
The number of threads to use for index generation, repository scan
and repository invalidation.
By default the number of threads will be set to the number of available
CPUs. This influences the number of spawned ctags processes as well.
Take a look at the "renamedHistory" option too. Theoretically "off" is the default option but this has a huge impact on the index time, so it's worth the check:
--renamedHistory on|off
Enable or disable generating history for renamed files.
If set to on, makes history indexing slower for repositories
with lots of renamed files. Default is off.

Is there any situation where I should not use --init when running a container?

I've been reading about docker and the zombie process problem and find out that in the new(ish?) version is possible to use the flag --init to use tini do handle the problems generated by PID 1.
https://blog.phusion.nl/2015/01/20/docker-and-the-pid-1-zombie-reaping-problem/
https://github.com/docker-library/official-images#init
https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/run/ (Section Specify an init process)
I get that build an image and put tini inside it may not always be possible, but now it is given for free (maybe there is a cost I'm not seeing) by the platform.

Why is my terminal output not identical when running a yarn script vs its bash equivalent?

**NOTE: I've added updates in order, just keep reading, thanks. :) **
I've been very curious about this -- please see this screenshot of me running:
ls -lah build, and
yarn run assets, which runs ls -lah build.
Let me start by saying that this is a WIP build in webpack, so no need to tell me that a 31M bundle is less than optimal. :)
But why do I get the colors and the more detailed font with the native command and not when yarn executes the command? It may be relevant: this screen shot is:
- Windows 10
- Webstorm terminal
- logged in to a docker container running Ubuntu 14.4
Thanks! :)
** UPDATE: --color=always restores color **
As #Charles Duffy suggested, adding --color=always in the yarn script preserved the formatting:
If anyone has some specialized knowledge to share about what's going on here, I'm in the market to hear it! Thanks!
Short(ish) answer: What's actually going on?
The below answer assumes the GNU implementation of ls.
There are a few possibilities at play:
Your interactive terminal's options may be modified by a shell alias. Output from type ls will indicate whether this is true.
You may have ls --color=auto enabled, either via an alias or via an equivalent environment variable; regardless, this checks whether it's writing directly to a TTY, and only enables color if so.
If output is not direct to a TTY (for instance, if output is being captured by yarn before it's printed), ls --color=auto will not colorize.
To fix this, you can explicitly pass ls --color=always, or its equivalent, simply ls --color. This covers both cases: If you had an alias in use passing --color=auto on your behalf, passing it explicitly means you no longer need the alias. By contrast, if yarn is capturing content rather than passing it straight to the TTY, then --color=always tells ls to ignore isatty() returning false and colorize anyhow.
Background on what the above means:
A "TTY" is, effectively, a terminal. It provides bells and whistles (literally, for the bells) specialized for providing a device that a user is actually typing at. This means it has control sequences for inspecting and modifying cursor location, and -- pertinently for our purposes -- for changing the color with which output is rendered.
A "FIFO" is a pipe -- it moves characters from point A to point B, first-in, first-out. In the case of prog-one | prog-two, the thing that connects those two is a FIFO. It just moves characters, and has no concept of cursor location or colorization or anything else.
If ls tried to put color sequences in its output when that output is intended for any destination other than a terminal, those sequences wouldn't make any sense -- indeed, the very format in which colorization markers need to be printed is determined by the TERM variable specifying the currently active terminal type.
If you run ls --color, then, you're promising ls that its output really will be rendered by a terminal, or (at least) otherwise something that understands the color sequences appropriate to the currently configured TERM.

Use all cores to make OpenCV 3 [duplicate]

Quick question: what is the compiler flag to allow g++ to spawn multiple instances of itself in order to compile large projects quicker (for example 4 source files at a time for a multi-core CPU)?
You can do this with make - with gnu make it is the -j flag (this will also help on a uniprocessor machine).
For example if you want 4 parallel jobs from make:
make -j 4
You can also run gcc in a pipe with
gcc -pipe
This will pipeline the compile stages, which will also help keep the cores busy.
If you have additional machines available too, you might check out distcc, which will farm compiles out to those as well.
There is no such flag, and having one runs against the Unix philosophy of having each tool perform just one function and perform it well. Spawning compiler processes is conceptually the job of the build system. What you are probably looking for is the -j (jobs) flag to GNU make, a la
make -j4
Or you can use pmake or similar parallel make systems.
People have mentioned make but bjam also supports a similar concept. Using bjam -jx instructs bjam to build up to x concurrent commands.
We use the same build scripts on Windows and Linux and using this option halves our build times on both platforms. Nice.
If using make, issue with -j. From man make:
-j [jobs], --jobs[=jobs]
Specifies the number of jobs (commands) to run simultaneously.
If there is more than one -j option, the last one is effective.
If the -j option is given without an argument, make will not limit the
number of jobs that can run simultaneously.
And most notably, if you want to script or identify the number of cores you have available (depending on your environment, and if you run in many environments, this can change a lot) you may use ubiquitous Python function cpu_count():
https://docs.python.org/3/library/multiprocessing.html#multiprocessing.cpu_count
Like this:
make -j $(python3 -c 'import multiprocessing as mp; print(int(mp.cpu_count() * 1.5))')
If you're asking why 1.5 I'll quote user artless-noise in a comment above:
The 1.5 number is because of the noted I/O bound problem. It is a rule of thumb. About 1/3 of the jobs will be waiting for I/O, so the remaining jobs will be using the available cores. A number greater than the cores is better and you could even go as high as 2x.
make will do this for you. Investigate the -j and -l switches in the man page. I don't think g++ is parallelizable.
distcc can also be used to distribute compiles not only on the current machine, but also on other machines in a farm that have distcc installed.
I'm not sure about g++, but if you're using GNU Make then "make -j N" (where N is the number of threads make can create) will allow make to run multple g++ jobs at the same time (so long as the files do not depend on each other).
GNU parallel
I was making a synthetic compilation benchmark and couldn't be bothered to write a Makefile, so I used:
sudo apt-get install parallel
ls | grep -E '\.c$' | parallel -t --will-cite "gcc -c -o '{.}.o' '{}'"
Explanation:
{.} takes the input argument and removes its extension
-t prints out the commands being run to give us an idea of progress
--will-cite removes the request to cite the software if you publish results using it...
parallel is so convenient that I could even do a timestamp check myself:
ls | grep -E '\.c$' | parallel -t --will-cite "\
if ! [ -f '{.}.o' ] || [ '{}' -nt '{.}.o' ]; then
gcc -c -o '{.}.o' '{}'
fi
"
xargs -P can also run jobs in parallel, but it is a bit less convenient to do the extension manipulation or run multiple commands with it: Calling multiple commands through xargs
Parallel linking was asked at: Can gcc use multiple cores when linking?
TODO: I think I read somewhere that compilation can be reduced to matrix multiplication, so maybe it is also possible to speed up single file compilation for large files. But I can't find a reference now.
Tested in Ubuntu 18.10.

Decrease bazel memory usage

I'm using bazel on a computer with 4 GB RAM (to compile the tensorflow project). Bazel does however not take into account the amount of memory I have and spawns too many jobs causing my machine to swap and leading to a longer build time.
I already tried setting the ram_utilization_factor flag through the following lines in my ~/.bazelrc
build --ram_utilization_factor 30
test --ram_utilization_factor 30
but that did not help. How are these factors to be understood anyway? Should I just randomly try out some others?
Some other flags that might help:
--host_jvm_args can be used to set how much memory the JVM should use by setting -Xms and/or -Xmx, e.g., bazel --host_jvm_args=-Xmx4g --host_jvm_args=-Xms512m build //foo:bar (docs).
--local_resources in conjunction with the --ram_utilization_factor flag (docs).
--jobs=10 (or some other low number, it defaults to 200), e.g. bazel build --jobs=2 //foo:bar (docs).
Note that --host_jvm_args is a startup option so it goes before the command (build) and --jobs is a "normal" build option so it goes after the command.
For me, the --jobs argument from #kristina's answer worked:
bazel build --jobs=1 tensorflow:libtensorflow_all.so
Note: --jobs=1 must follow, not precede build, otherwise bazel will not recognize it. If you were to type bazel --jobs=1 build tensorflow:libtensorflow_all.so, you would get this error message:
Unknown Bazel startup option: '--jobs=1'.
Just wanted to second #sashoalm's comment that the --jobs=1 flag was what made bazel build finally work.
For reference, I'm running bazel on Lubuntu 17.04, running as a VirtualBox guest with about 1.5 GB RAM and two cores of an Intel i3 (I'm running a Thinkpad T460). I was following the O'Reilly tutorial on TensorFlow (https://www.oreilly.com/learning/dive-into-tensorflow-with-linux), and ran into trouble at the following step:
$ bazel build tensorflow/examples/label_image:label_image
Changing this to bazel build --jobs=1 tensorflow/... did the trick.
i ran into quite a few unstability that bazel build failed in my k8s cluster.
Besides --jobs=1, try this:
https://docs.bazel.build/versions/master/command-line-reference.html#flag--local_resources
E.g. --local_resources=4096,2.0,1.0

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