<div dir="ltr"><div>I agree with your observations and proposal.<br></div><div><br></div><div><div><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><span><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr">
<div style="TEXT-ALIGN:left"><span style="FONT-SIZE:12px"><span style="FONT-FAMILY:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Kind regards,<br><br>SebA<br><br></span></span></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></span></div></div></div><br></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Wed, 30 Jan 2019 at 15:59, Beck, Zak <<a href="mailto:zak.beck@accenture.com">zak.beck@accenture.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(3,45,253)">The UTF8 / ASCII thing – interestingly, going right back to v1, the client has used an ASCII encoder. It has to use something because Socket.Send() expects a byte array, the data packet
is constructed as a string and so you need to use an encoder from System.Text to convert the string to a byte array.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(3,45,253)"><u></u> <u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(3,45,253)">The change in v2.21 was to add the Remove-Diacritics function, which is to strip out non-ASCII characters and also the 0xa0 non-breaking space. I can see how Remove-Diacritics might
be a performance bottleneck on a long string.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(3,45,253)"><u></u> <u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(3,45,253)">People with
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diacritic" target="_blank">diacritics</a> may be using UTF8 anyway, I suspect most people using ASCII have no idea about the diacritic removal and have no need for it. Therefore I propose three values for the XymonAcceptUTF8 setting and
this should impact on the minimum of people:<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(3,45,253)"><u></u> <u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(3,45,253)">0 (the default) – use “original” ASCII, i.e. as per the original behaviour. This may cause diacritics to come through as unreadable multi-byte characters.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(3,45,253)">1 – use UTF8<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(3,45,253)">2 – use “pure” ASCII, i.e. filter through Remove-Diacritics<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(3,45,253)"><u></u> <u></u></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(3,45,253)">Zak <u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN-US">From:</span></b><span lang="EN-US"> Beck, Zak
<br>
<b>Sent:</b> Wednesday, 30 January 2019 15:04<br>
<b>To:</b> 'SebA' <<a href="mailto:spah@syntec.co.uk" target="_blank">spah@syntec.co.uk</a>><br>
<b>Cc:</b> Xymon Mailing List <<a href="mailto:xymon@xymon.com" target="_blank">xymon@xymon.com</a>><br>
<b>Subject:</b> RE: [External] [Xymon] Xymon WinPSclient performance<u></u><u></u></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(3,45,253)">Yes, I remember our conversation – very difficult for me to replicate.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(3,45,253)"><u></u> <u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(3,45,253)">I can definitely make this optional, and will most likely look to make this default to off.<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(3,45,253)"><u></u> <u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(3,45,253)">Zak </span><span style="color:rgb(3,45,253)"><u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN-US">From:</span></b><span lang="EN-US"> SebA <<a href="mailto:spah@syntec.co.uk" target="_blank">spah@syntec.co.uk</a>>
<br>
<b>Sent:</b> Wednesday, 30 January 2019 14:57<br>
<b>To:</b> Beck, Zak <<a href="mailto:zak.beck@accenture.com" target="_blank">zak.beck@accenture.com</a>><br>
<b>Cc:</b> Xymon Mailing List <<a href="mailto:xymon@xymon.com" target="_blank">xymon@xymon.com</a>><br>
<b>Subject:</b> Re: [External] [Xymon] Xymon WinPSclient performance<u></u><u></u></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">Good news and bad news. The good news is that enabling XymonAcceptUTF8 makes the cycle run a lot faster and seems to work fine for us, without doubling the number of bytes sent in the report. I think the default though should probably
be not to change the behaviour compared with the previous version (v2.19). Failing that, the default should probably be to enable XymonAcceptUTF8 - the default should not be something that slows down the cycle and uses lots of CPU time IMHO.<br>
<br>
The bad news is I have found another thing to takes time: XymonDiskPart.<br>
<br>
2019-01-30 13:39:13 XymonDiskPart start<br>
2019-01-30 13:39:17 XymonDiskPart finished<br>
<br>
I see this only runs every 'slow scan', but:<br>
(a) this also takes 4 seconds to complete;<br>
(b) I don't know what the use of it is, at least for most people, and it's not documented in XymonPSClient.doc - this is a possible example of feature bloat;<br>
(c) it causes a bad memory leak in the Virtual Disk service (vds.exe) on our failover cluster servers that have clustered disk.<br>
<br>
Commenting out line 3875 in v2.28 r8017 has no negative consequences for us and removes this vds.exe memory leak. I have compared patched and unpatched processes running for several months on otherwise identical servers. We have had a conversation about this,
see here: <a href="https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__lists.xymon.com_archive_2018-2DMarch_045341.html&d=DwMFaQ&c=eIGjsITfXP_y-DLLX0uEHXJvU8nOHrUK8IrwNKOtkVU&r=S-aLwpx-PHBTBMIG_c2JczRC0SfuZCmsiH9Iams25FI&m=Yihzb9N4fl-Dl1BgOxMCrJsBMmLNdwI2ItiW5rRVcV8&s=-52Qhrm1-bvmWiTrhmSxyNmQdwM04ZP_KbPkNkWSIiA&e=" target="_blank">
https://lists.xymon.com/archive/2018-March/045341.html</a><br>
But you didn't respond to that last message. Since the Virtual Disk service was last restarted on the unpatched server on 30/11/18 (so in 2 months), it has leaked up to today nearly 900 MB RAM and 9 GB of virtual memory.<br>
<br>
Please can XymonDiskPart be made optional in the config?<br>
<br>
We have another server (2012 R2, no failover cluster, no clustered disks) that is using 1 GB RAM and 2 GB virtual memory in the Xymon powershell process also (unpatched) v2.28 after 43 hours running. I haven't yet investigated the cause, but I'll try replacing
it with the patched version without XymonDiskPart and see if that cures the memory leak.<br>
<br clear="all">
<u></u><u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12pt"><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif">Kind regards,<br>
<br>
SebA</span><u></u><u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">On Tue, 29 Jan 2019 at 15:28, SebA <<a href="mailto:spah@syntec.co.uk" target="_blank">spah@syntec.co.uk</a>> wrote:<u></u><u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">Hi Zak,<u></u><u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">Thanks, yes, haha, I did notice the irony myself and was going to point it out, or change my first paragraph to put the emphasis on reducing CPU time spent, but I forgot! I noticed that powershell (on some versions of the PSclient) was
using more CPU time than the process the server exists to run, which is clearly not a good situation.<u></u><u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">So if I select UTF-8, it's not going to double the size of the messages sent to the Xymon server? I'll give it a go and see what happens.<u></u><u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">I think being able to configure the scan interval for CPUs would be good.<u></u><u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">The latest version of PSclient was not even completing one cycle before I was giving up and killing it, but I'll try UTF-8 and/or another server.<u></u><u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12pt"><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif">Kind regards,<br>
<br>
SebA</span><u></u><u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">On Tue, 29 Jan 2019 at 11:59, Beck, Zak <<a href="mailto:zak.beck@accenture.com" target="_blank">zak.beck@accenture.com</a>> wrote:<u></u><u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(3,45,253)">Hi</span><u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(3,45,253)"> </span><u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(3,45,253)">Yes, there is no option for no encoding – I think the closest option to this is actually UTF-8 because it does not attempt to adjust the message body
(remove diacritics and 0xa0 spaces) before sending. That’s what is happening between your two log messages. Personally I don’t see that behaviour albeit with a 10x smaller data packet (I checked on several servers):</span><u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(3,45,253)"> </span><u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(3,45,253)">2019-01-29 11:43:06 Using ASCII encoding</span><u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(3,45,253)">2019-01-29 11:43:06 Connecting to host x.x.x.x</span><u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(3,45,253)">2019-01-29 11:43:06 Sent 100537 bytes to server</span><u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(3,45,253)"> </span><u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(3,45,253)">We can add a third option to do no encoding I guess.</span><u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(3,45,253)"> </span><u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(3,45,253)">Detecting CPUs is entirely down to this WMI call: Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Processor. Yes, it does take time. I have tried over the years to reduce
the amount of WMI calls (I think we’re down to 4) because they do seem to take a lot of time and on occasion are unreliable. Unfortunately I have not been able to find an alternative to this call. And I have 1000 VMs which can have CPUs hot added without reboot,
so there is use case for checking every time. The result of the WMI call is already cached so we could amend the script to optionally run only on slow scans (every 6 hours by default).</span><u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(3,45,253)"> </span><u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(3,45,253)">It may be simpler to add regex processing for your filename issue, I can take a look.</span><u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(3,45,253)"> </span><u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(3,45,253)">I had to chuckle, I hope you appreciate the irony of saying we’re suffering from feature bloat and then requesting more enhancements / features
</span><span style="font-family:"Segoe UI Emoji",sans-serif;color:rgb(3,45,253)">😉</span><u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(3,45,253)"> </span><u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(3,45,253)">Zak
</span><u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(3,45,253)"> </span><u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span lang="EN-US">From:</span></b><span lang="EN-US"> Xymon <<a href="mailto:xymon-bounces@xymon.com" target="_blank">xymon-bounces@xymon.com</a>>
<b>On Behalf Of </b>SebA<br>
<b>Sent:</b> Monday, 28 January 2019 20:16<br>
<b>To:</b> Xymon Mailing List <<a href="mailto:xymon@xymon.com" target="_blank">xymon@xymon.com</a>><br>
<b>Subject:</b> [External] [Xymon] Xymon WinPSclient performance</span><u></u><u></u></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> <u></u><u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">It's great the way features have been added to Xymon WinPSclient, but I think it's started suffering from feature bloat now, illustrating the importance of making each feature optional
like BBWin did very effectively. We are seeing memory leaks on Windows 2012 R2 using version 2.28 (I started another thread about memory leaks a while back - I'll come back to this issue another time) and more and more CPU time being used up during each cycle.<br>
<br>
It seems that from version v2.21 a slow ASCII encoding conversion was added:<br>
<br>
myServer1 - : xymonclient.ps1 2.21 2017-04-28 <a href="mailto:zak.beck@accenture.com" target="_blank">
zak.beck@accenture.com</a><br>
2019-01-28 19:19:26 Sending to server<br>
2019-01-28 19:19:26 Using ASCII encoding<br>
2019-01-28 19:<b>20</b>:25 Connecting to host x.x.x.x <-- Yes, that took about
<b>1 minute of 100% processing of 1 of the 8 CPUs/Cores</b>.<br>
2019-01-28 19:20:26 Sent 2007850 bytes to server <-- OK, yes, that's rather a lot of data, but still it's not good.<br>
2019-01-28 19:20:26 Received 130 bytes from server<br>
<br>
Compare with:<br>
myServer1 - : xymonclient.ps1 2.19 2016-12-28 <a href="mailto:zak.beck@accenture.com" target="_blank">
zak.beck@accenture.com</a><br>
2019-01-28 19:15:59 Sending to server<br>
2019-01-28 19:15:59 Connecting to host x.x.x.x<br>
2019-01-28 19:15:59 Sent 2006765 bytes to server<br>
2019-01-28 19:16:00 Received 130 bytes from server<br>
<br>
Is it possible that converting to ASCII step introduced in v2.21 be made optional? In the latest version it is possible to send via UTF8, which was new in v2.21, or convert to ASCII, but it's not possible via configuration alone, I believe, to have the old
behaviour (from v2.19) that worked fine for us and was far faster.<br>
<br>
Another slow process is detecting the number of CPUs (on the same server):<br>
<br>
2019-01-28 19:29:05 XymonCollectInfo: Process info<br>
2019-01-28 19:29:05 XymonCollectInfo: calling XymonProcsCPUUtilisation<br>
2019-01-28 19:29:05 XymonCollectInfo: CPU info (WMI)<br>
2019-01-28 19:29:13 Found 8 CPUs, total of 0 cores<br>
2019-01-28 19:29:13 XymonCollectInfo: OS info (including memory) (WMI)<br>
2019-01-28 19:29:13 XymonCollectInfo: Service info (WMI)<br>
<br>
<b>8 seconds</b> for that. Why does it need to do this every time? The number of CPUs does not normally change without at least rebooting. It could do it just on the first cycle and cache it for future cycles.<br>
<br>
Another thing that would really speed up processing for us is being able to dynamically specify the filenames using special characters or something for the date, e.g. &DD &MM &YY<br>
We have files that rotate with new filesnames and if we could narrow down the filenames to process it would speed up processing by several more seconds.<br>
E.g. C:\Temp\myServerLog29-12-18.0.log<br>
<br>
In client-local.cfg:<u></u><u></u></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal">Instead of:<br>
log:C:\Temp\myServerLog*.log:10240<br>
If we could to this, it would mean we process a small fraction of the number of files:<br>
log:C:\Temp\myServerLog&DD-&MM-&YY.*.log:10240<br>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12pt"><span style="font-size:9pt;font-family:"Arial",sans-serif">Kind regards,<br>
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SebA</span><u></u><u></u></p>
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