A portion of the disclosure of this patent document contains material which is subject to copyright protection. The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent document or the patent disclosure, as it appears in the Patent and Trademark Office patent file or records, but otherwise reserves all copyright rights whatsoever.
The following commonly owned, co-pending or other United States patents and Patent Applications, including the present application, are related to each other. Each of the other patents/applications listed below are incorporated by reference herein in its entirety:
U.S. Provisional Patent Application 61/395,407 entitled Method and System for Identifying Errors in Code, by Zuye Zheng, filed May 12, 2010 (Attorney Docket No. 48-28/336PROV), and U.S. Utility patent application Ser. No. 13/105,849 entitled Method and System for Identifying Errors in Code, by Zuye Zheng, filed May 11, 2011 (Attorney Docket No. 48-39/336US), and U.S. Utility patent application Ser. No. ______ entitled Method and System for Identifying Errors in Code, by Zuye Zheng, filed ______ (Attorney Docket No.: 48-0D/336US2).
One or more implementations relate generally to computer systems and more specifically to debugging software.
The subject matter discussed in the background section should not be assumed to be prior art merely as a result of its mention in the background section. Similarly, a problem mentioned in the background section or associated with the subject matter of the background section should not be assumed to have been previously recognized in the prior art. The subject matter in the background section merely represents different approaches, which in and of themselves may also be inventions.
In conventional database systems, users access their data resources in one logical database. A user of such a conventional system typically retrieves data from and stores data on the system using the user's own systems. A user system might remotely access one of a plurality of server systems that might in turn access the database system. Data retrieval from the system might include the issuance of a query from the user system to the database system. The database system might process the request for information received in the query and send to the user system information relevant to the request. In conventional software debugging, software developers use a variety of tools to browse, inspect, and analyze heap dumps. In general, a heap dump is a snapshot of all the live objects and classes in the system memory at a particular point in time. The ability to load and view heap dumps and recreate the object dependencies and analyze classes and objects for memory usage may allow software developers to debug system crashes due to memory shortage errors and determine application memory footprints, among other things.
However, in a cloud computing environment with numerous application servers running constantly, processing each heap dump manually is a tedious and time consuming task that is not practical. Furthermore, due to the nature of cloud computing architectures, a single problem can be propagated to numerous application servers, causing numerous heap dumps of the same issue (duplication). Developers want to be able to efficiently identify, analyze, and debug errors in heap dumps.
Accordingly, it may be desirable to provide techniques enabling the automatic identification of errors in code.
In the following drawings like reference numbers are used to refer to like elements. Although the following figures depict various examples, the one or more implementations are not limited to the examples depicted in the figures.
Systems and methods are provided for identifying errors in code. These mechanisms and methods for identifying errors in code can enable embodiments to automatically process and analyze heap dumps. The ability of embodiments to automatically process and analyze heaps dumps can enable automatically identifying suspect classes and possible duplicate out of memory error occurrences using machine learning.
In at least one embodiment and by way of example, a method for identifying errors in code is provided. The method may include rebuilding object dependencies from a heap dump, calculating memory usage of each object, identifying top consumers of memory by object class, analyzing how much memory each class consumes with respect to how much other classes consume, building a corpus of data that may be used in a progressive machine learning algorithm, and identifying suspect classes that are suspected of causing out of memory issues (optionally, in addition, other memory usage issues may be identified). Additionally, the suspect classes and the memory usage statistics of the suspect classes may then be used as an identifying signature of the associated out of memory error. The signature of the out of memory error may include statistics about each suspect class such as the retained and shallow heap, object count, which objects were loaded into active memory at the time of the heap dump, and the occurrence index (as indicated by the heap dump performed upon the indication of the out of memory error. The identifying signature of the associated out of memory error may then be used to compare with the signatures of other out of memory occurrences for identifying duplicate error occurrences.
While embodiments of techniques for identifying errors in code may be implemented in a system having an application server providing a front end for an on-demand database service capable of supporting multiple tenants, the embodiments are not limited to multi-tenant databases, are not limited to databases, and are not limited to deployment on application servers. Embodiments may be practiced using other database architectures, i.e., ORACLE®, DB2® by IBM, or no database, without departing from the scope of the embodiments claimed.
In at least one embodiment, heap dump memory analysis may be performed by rebuilding some or all object and primitive dependencies in a heap dump, such as a Java hprof (a heap/CPU profiling tool) binary heap dump or other heap profiling tool.
In an embodiment using the heap profiling tool, the profiling tool may provide a command line, may be a native agent library of a virtual machine (e.g., a JAVA Virtual Machine or JVM) that is dynamically loaded through a command line option, at the startup of the virtual machine, which may become part of the virtual machine process, thereby allowing users to request various types of heap and/or CPU profiling features from the profiling tool. In an embodiment, the data generated by the heap profiling tool may be provided in textual or binary format, and may facilitate the tracking down and isolation of performance problems involving memory usage and inefficient code. The binary format file from the heap profiling tool may be used with heap analysis tool, such as JAVA's Heap Analysis Tool (HAT) to browse the allocated objects in the heap. Java hprof is a command line profiling tool for heap and central processing unit (CPU) profiling. It is noted that in other embodiments, any other profiling routine that is capable of profiling heap dumps or binary heap dumps may be used instead of hprof. After rebuilding and remapping the dependencies, the heap profiling tool may then analyze each object for memory usage statistics, such as the shallow heap and retained heap by traversing the dependency trees of the heap dump. The shallow heap is the memory usage of one object. The retained heap of an object is the memory usage of one object plus the memory usage of all objects to which the object has access to. The shallow heap is the memory usage of an object may include the memory required to store some or all of the primitive values of the object along with the size of the pointers to other objects, but not the actual size in memory of those objects. The retained heap usage of an object may include the memory required to store all of the primitive values of the object along with the pointer size and retained heap usage of each object the object (for which the retained heap was created) points to, with the caveat that the retained heap usage of any child object may only be accounted for once in the final calculation of memory usage.
In at least one embodiment, the shallow and retained heaps may be grouped together by class to calculate the shallow and retained heaps of entire classes along with the number of objects created for each class. In embodiments, the heap dumps may be analyzed for memory leaks or classes that have excessive memory usage. A memory leak may occur when memory that is no longer in use is not freed. Although not necessarily a memory leak, an object that allocates large amounts of memory, which may in fact be nominally in use, but does no need to be kept in use is also a problem that the memory usage analysis may identify. The classes that caused the out of memory occurrence may have the highest shallow and/or retained heaps.
In at least one embodiment, in order to identify errors that are suspected to have caused an out-of-memory error (which may be referred to as out-of-memory suspects), all of the object classes related to an application may be sorted by retained heap size. Using the list of object classes sorted by retained heap sizes, the top N classes may be considered, where N may be determined by the nature of the application that generated the heap dump, as anything below these top N classes may be very unlikely to have caused the out of memory error, because the classes below the top N may not have used enough memory to cause an error. Also, the classes below this cutoff (that is below the top N classes) may use significantly less memory than the top N classes and have very similar shallow and retained heap size as compared to differences in the top N classes and thus may only be noise in suspect identification.
In at least one embodiment with the use of the top N classes of several heap dumps, generated during the running of the same application, a debugger may build a corpus or body of data to detect anomalies that are suspects in causing the out of memory occurrences during the running of that application. In the first few heap dumps, the sorting by size may produce inaccurate suspect identifications as the corpus of data is built, but may be instructive in learning what may be normal and what may be anomalies. However, with more data in the form of heap dumps gained from further application runs, the debugger may learn and be able to more accurately identify suspects through a scoring system based on the sorting.
In at least one embodiment, a scoring system may be based on the mean and standard deviation of the size of the shallow heap and retained heap, number of objects, and an occurrence index in the top N classes of each class across all heap dumps. In an embodiment given a new heap dump and class C in the top N classes, the debugger may query all past heap dumps for the occurrence of class C, where class C is not identified as the suspect in that heap dump. If the class C is not found in any previous head dump analysis, the class C is an anomaly. If the class C has been found in previous analyzed heap dumps, then statistics including, the mean and standard deviation of the shallow and retained heap, number of objects, and occurrence index are calculated for all previous occurrences of class C. Using the statistics calculated for previous occurrences of class C, the probability that class C is a suspect may be calculated by an equally weighted probability of the likelihood of each statistic of class C given the historical mean and standard deviation. In embodiments a scoring system may equally weight these statistics to reduce noise from non-significant anomalies. This probability may then be the score of class C such that the higher the score, the higher the probability that C is a suspect (other forms of scoring could be used instead, such as the lower the score the higher the probability that C is a suspect). A score may be calculated for each class in the top N classes of a heap dump. In at least one embodiment, with the calculated scores, a threshold may be determined by the nature of the application that is the source of the heap dump to identify suspects in a heap dump automatically.
In at least one embodiment, each of the steps of method 100 is a distinct step. In another embodiment, although depicted as distinct steps in
Identification of Duplicate Out of Memory Occurrences with Suspect Identification
In at least one embodiment, the suspect identification scores may be utilized to further analyze heap dumps to look for heap dumps with a similar suspect signature to identify duplicate out of memory occurrences. The suspect signature of a specific heap dump may be the suspects identified through suspect identification along with statistics about each suspect class such as the retained and shallow heap, object count, and occurrence index.
In at least one embodiment, a scoring system may be utilized to calculate the probability that a new occurrence of an out of memory is a duplicate by first finding other out of memory occurrences with matching or very similar suspect classes. If no occurrence with a similar signature is found then the out of memory occurrence is probably not a duplicate. If similar occurrences are found, the similar occurrences are first grouped in sets by whether there are any duplicates. The averages and standard deviations of sets with multiple duplicates may then be calculated and scored with the new occurrence. The out of memory occurrences without duplicates may be directly scored with the new occurrence substituting the matching occurrences actual statistics as the averages and a pre-determined default standard deviation as the standard deviation of the set. In at least one embodiment, with the duplication scores, a threshold may be determined by the nature of the application that is the source of the heap dump to identify duplicate out of memory occurrences automatically.
In at least one embodiment, each of the steps of method 200 is a distinct step. In another embodiment, although depicted as distinct steps in
Process space 300 is the portion of the system where various programs for running the system reside, which is discussed further in below conjunction with
Environment 410 is an environment in which an on-demand database service exists. User system 412 may be any machine or system that is used by a user to access a database user system. For example, any of user systems 412 can be a handheld computing device, a mobile phone, a laptop computer, a work station, and/or a network of computing devices. As illustrated in
An on-demand database service, such as system 416, is a database system that is made available to outside users that do not need to necessarily be concerned with building and/or maintaining the database system, but instead may be available for their use when the users need the database system (e.g., on the demand of the users). Some on-demand database services may store information from one or more tenants stored into tables of a common database image to form a multi-tenant database system (MTS). Accordingly, “on-demand database service 416” and “system 416” will be used interchangeably herein. A database image may include one or more database objects. A relational database management system (RDMS) or the equivalent may execute storage and retrieval of information against the database object(s). Application platform 418 may be a framework that allows the applications of system 416 to run, such as the hardware and/or software, e.g., the operating system. In an embodiment, on-demand database service 416 may include an application platform 418 that enables creation, managing and executing one or more applications developed by the provider of the on-demand database service, users accessing the on-demand database service via user systems 412, or third party application developers accessing the on-demand database service via user systems 412.
The users of user systems 412 may differ in their respective capacities, and the capacity of a particular user system 412 might be entirely determined by permissions (permission levels) for the current user. For example, where a salesperson is using a particular user system 412 to interact with system 416, that user system has the capacities allotted to that salesperson. However, while an administrator is using that user system to interact with system 416, that user system has the capacities allotted to that administrator. In systems with a hierarchical role model, users at one permission level may have access to applications, data, and database information accessible by a lower permission level user, but may not have access to certain applications, database information, and data accessible by a user at a higher permission level. Thus, different users will have different capabilities with regard to accessing and modifying application and database information, depending on a user's security or permission level.
Network 414 is any network or combination of networks of devices that communicate with one another. For example, network 414 can be anyone or any combination of a LAN (local area network), WAN (wide area network), telephone network, wireless network, point-to-point network, star network, token ring network, hub network, or other appropriate configuration. As the most common type of computer network in current use is a TCP/IP (Transfer Control Protocol and Internet Protocol) network, such as the global internetwork of networks often referred to as the “Internet” with a capital “I,” that network will be used in many of the examples herein. However, it should be understood that the networks that the one or more implementations might use are not so limited, although TCP/IP is a frequently implemented protocol.
User systems 412 might communicate with system 416 using TCP/IP and, at a higher network level, use other common Internet protocols to communicate, such as HTTP, FTP, AFS, WAP, etc. In an example where HTTP is used, user system 412 might include an HTTP client commonly referred to as a “browser” for sending and receiving HTTP messages to and from an HTTP server at system 416. Such an HTTP server might be implemented as the sole network interface between system 416 and network 414, but other techniques might be used as well or instead. In some implementations, the interface between system 416 and network 414 includes load sharing functionality, such as round-robin HTTP request distributors to balance loads and distribute incoming HTTP requests evenly over a plurality of servers. At least as for the users that are accessing that server, each of the plurality of servers has access to the MTS' data; however, other alternative configurations may be used instead.
In one embodiment, system 416, shown in
One arrangement for elements of system 416 is shown in
Several elements in the system shown in
According to one embodiment, each user system 412 and all of its components are operator configurable using applications, such as a browser, including computer code run using a central processing unit such as an Intel Pentium® processor or the like. Similarly, system 416 (and additional instances of an MTS, where more than one is present) and all of their components might be operator configurable using application(s) including computer code to run using a central processing unit such as processor system 417, which may include an Intel Pentium® processor or the like, and/or multiple processor units. A computer program product embodiment includes a machine-readable storage medium (media) having instructions stored thereon/in which can be used to program a computer to perform any of the processes of the embodiments described herein. Computer code for operating and configuring system 416 to intercommunicate and to process webpages, applications and other data and media content as described herein are preferably downloaded and stored on a hard disk, but the entire program code, or portions thereof, may also be stored in any other volatile or non-volatile memory medium or device as is well known, such as a ROM or RAM, or provided on any media capable of storing program code, such as any type of rotating media including floppy disks, optical discs, digital versatile disk (DVD), compact disk (CD), micro-drive, and magneto-optical disks, and magnetic or optical cards, nanosystems (including molecular memory ICs), or any type of media or device suitable for storing instructions and/or data. Additionally, the entire program code, or portions thereof, may be transmitted and downloaded from a software source over a transmission medium, e.g., over the Internet, or from another server, as is well known, or transmitted over any other conventional network connection as is well known (e.g., extranet, VPN, LAN, etc.) using any communication medium and protocols (e.g., TCP/IP, HTTP, HTTPS, Ethernet, etc.) as are well known. It will also be appreciated that computer code for implementing embodiments can be implemented in any programming language that can be executed on a client system and/or server or server system such as, for example, C, C++, HTML, any other markup language, Java™, JavaScript, ActiveX, any other scripting language, such as VBScript, and many other programming languages as are well known may be used (Java™ is a trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc.).
According to one embodiment, each system 416 is configured to provide webpages, forms, applications, data and media content to user (client) systems 412 to support the access by user systems 412 as tenants of system 416. As such, system 416 provides security mechanisms to keep each tenant's data separate unless the data is shared. If more than one MTS is used, they may be located in close proximity to one another (e.g., in a server farm located in a single building or campus), or they may be distributed at locations remote from one another (e.g., one or more servers located in city A and one or more servers located in city B). As used herein, each MTS could include one or more logically and/or physically connected servers distributed locally or across one or more geographic locations. Additionally, the term “server” is meant to include a computer system, including processing hardware and process space(s), and an associated storage system and database application (e.g., OODBMS or RDBMS) as is well known in the art. It should also be understood that “server system” and “server” are often used interchangeably herein. Similarly, the database object described herein can be implemented as single databases, a distributed database, a collection of distributed databases, a database with redundant online or offline backups or other redundancies, etc., and might include a distributed database or storage network and associated processing intelligence.
User system 412, network 414, system 416, tenant data storage 422, and system data storage 424 were discussed above in
Application platform 418 includes an application setup mechanism 538 that supports application developers' creation and management of applications, which may be saved as metadata into tenant data storage 422 by save routines 536 for execution by subscribers as one or more tenant process spaces 504 managed by tenant management process 510 for example. Invocations to such applications may be coded using PL/SOQL 534 that provides a programming language style interface extension to API 532. A detailed description of some PL/SOQL language embodiments is discussed in commonly owned co-pending U.S. Provisional Patent Application 60/828,192 entitled, PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR EXTENDING APIS TO EXECUTE IN CONJUNCTION WITH DATABASE APIS, by Craig Weissman, filed Oct. 4, 2006, which is incorporated in its entirety herein for all purposes. Invocations to applications may be detected by one or more system processes, which manages retrieving application metadata 516 for the subscriber making the invocation and executing the metadata as an application in a virtual machine.
Each application server 500 may be communicably coupled to database systems, e.g., having access to system data 425 and tenant data 423, via a different network connection. For example, one application server 5001 might be coupled via the network 414 (e.g., the Internet), another application server 500N-1 might be coupled via a direct network link, and another application server SOON might be coupled by yet a different network connection. Transfer Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) are typical protocols for communicating between application servers 500 and the database system. However, it will be apparent to one skilled in the art that other transport protocols may be used to optimize the system depending on the network interconnect used.
In at least one embodiment, each application server 500 is configured to handle requests for any user associated with any organization that is a tenant. Because it is desirable to be able to add and remove application servers from the server pool at any time for any reason, there is preferably no server affinity for a user and/or organization to a specific application server 500. In one embodiment, therefore, an interface system implementing a load balancing function (e.g., an F5 Big-IP load balancer) is communicably coupled between the application servers 500 and the user systems 412 to distribute requests to the application servers 500. In one embodiment, the load balancer uses a least connections algorithm to route user requests to the application servers 500. Other examples of load balancing algorithms, such as round robin and observed response time, also can be used. For example, in certain embodiments, three consecutive requests from the same user could hit three different application servers 500, and three requests from different users could hit the same application server 500. In this manner, system 416 is multi-tenant, wherein system 416 handles storage of, and access to, different objects, data and applications across disparate users and organizations.
As an example of storage, one tenant might be a company that employs a sales force where each salesperson uses system 416 to manage their sales process. Thus, a user might maintain contact data, leads data, customer follow-up data, performance data, goals and progress data, etc., all applicable to that user's personal sales process (e.g., in tenant data storage 422). In an example of a MTS arrangement, since all of the data and the applications to access, view, modify, report, transmit, calculate, etc., can be maintained and accessed by a user system having nothing more than network access, the user can manage his or her sales efforts and cycles from any of many different user systems. For example, if a salesperson is visiting a customer and the customer has Internet access in their lobby, the salesperson can obtain critical updates as to that customer while waiting for the customer to arrive in the lobby.
While each user's data might be separate from other users' data regardless of the employers of each user, some data might be organization-wide data shared or accessible by a plurality of users or all of the users for a given organization that is a tenant. Thus, there might be some data structures managed by system 416 that are allocated at the tenant level while other data structures might be managed at the user level. Because an MTS might support multiple tenants including possible competitors, the MTS should have security protocols that keep data, applications, and application use separate. Also, because many tenants may opt for access to an MTS rather than maintain their own system, redundancy, up-time, and backup are additional functions that may be implemented in the MTS. In addition to user-specific data and tenant specific data, system 416 might also maintain system level data usable by multiple tenants or other data. Such system level data might include industry reports, news, postings, and the like that are sharable among tenants.
In certain embodiments, user systems 412 (which may be client systems) communicate with application servers 500 to request and update system-level and tenant-level data from system 416 that may require sending one or more queries to tenant data storage 422 and/or system data storage 424. System 416 (e.g., an application server 500 in system 416) automatically generates one or more SQL statements (e.g., one or more SQL queries) that are designed to access the desired information. System data storage 424 may generate query plans to access the requested data from the database.
Each database can generally be viewed as a collection of objects, such as a set of logical tables, containing data fitted into predefined categories. A “table” is one representation of a data object, and may be used herein to simplify the conceptual description of objects and custom objects. It should be understood that “table” and “object” may be used interchangeably herein. Each table generally contains one or more data categories logically arranged as columns or fields in a viewable schema. Each row or record of a table contains an instance of data for each category defined by the fields. For example, a CRM database may include a table that describes a customer with fields for basic contact information such as name, address, phone number, fax number, etc. Another table might describe a purchase order, including fields for information such as customer, product, sale price, date, etc. In some multi-tenant database systems, standard entity tables might be provided for use by all tenants. For CRM database applications, such standard entities might include tables for Account, Contact, Lead, and Opportunity data, each containing pre-defined fields. It should be understood that the word “entity” may also be used interchangeably herein with “object” and “table”.
In some multi-tenant database systems, tenants may be allowed to create and store custom objects, or they may be allowed to customize standard entities or objects, for example by creating custom fields for standard objects, including custom index fields. U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/817,161, filed Apr. 2, 2004, entitled “Custom Entities and Fields in a Multi-Tenant Database System”, and which is hereby incorporated herein by reference, teaches systems and methods for creating custom objects as well as customizing standard objects in a multi-tenant database system. In certain embodiments, for example, all custom entity data rows are stored in a single multi-tenant physical table, which may contain multiple logical tables per organization. It is transparent to customers that their multiple “tables” are in fact stored in one large table or that their data may be stored in the same table as the data of other customers.
In step 704, system 416 (
In step 706, user system 412 is communicatively coupled to network 414. In step 708, system 416 is communicatively coupled to network 414 allowing user system 412 and system 416 to communicate with one another (
While one or more implementations have been described by way of example and in terms of the specific embodiments, it is to be understood that one or more implementations are not limited to the disclosed embodiments. To the contrary, it is intended to cover various modifications and similar arrangements as would be apparent to those skilled in the art. Therefore, the scope of the appended claims should be accorded the broadest interpretation so as to encompass all such modifications and similar arrangements.
This application is a continuation of U.S. Utility patent application Ser. No. 13/105,849, entitled METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR IDENTIFYING ERRORS IN CODE, by Zuye Zheng, filed May 11, 2011 (Attorney Docket No. 48-39/336US), which claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional Patent Application 61/395,407, entitled METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR IDENTIFYING ERRORS IN CODE, by Zuye Zheng, filed May 12, 2010 (Attorney Docket No. 48-28/336PROV), and the contents of all of the above listed applications are incorporated herein by reference, in their entirety.
Number | Date | Country | |
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61395407 | May 2010 | US |
Number | Date | Country | |
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Parent | 13105849 | May 2011 | US |
Child | 13969246 | US |