[Xymon] [External] Xymon WinPSclient performance

Wed Jan 30 14:57:36 CET 2019

Hi

Hmm ok, that is quite a specific requirement, thanks for the detail, I understand it now – find files matching today’s date with a certain pattern. That might be a candidate for an external script where you can do whatever you want more precisely.

One problem is this part of the code is pretty old, I think I’ve hardly changed it, it’s called from multiple places and it already adds functionality like trying to expand environment variables like %APPDATA%. It then uses Resolve-Path to resolve the wildcards. Resolve-Path does not support regex or date filters so I’d have to change that to get a list of all the filenames and then compare to the regex / date filter. That will be slow (relatively) especially on a large directory with thousands of files. But it would filter down the filename candidates for log processing. I’ve added it to my todo list / tracker.

Zak

From: SebA <spah at syntec.co.uk>
Sent: Wednesday, 30 January 2019 10:57
To: Beck, Zak <zak.beck at accenture.com>
Cc: Xymon Mailing List <xymon at xymon.com>
Subject: Re: [External] [Xymon] Xymon WinPSclient performance

Zak,

I forgot to mention:
regex may not cut it for the filename issue - it's placeholders for parts of the date that would be useful here, where that placeholder is substituted with that part of the date, e.g. in Python:
%d -- Day of the month as a zero-padded decimal number - ref: http://strftime.org/<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__strftime.org_&d=DwMFaQ&c=eIGjsITfXP_y-DLLX0uEHXJvU8nOHrUK8IrwNKOtkVU&r=S-aLwpx-PHBTBMIG_c2JczRC0SfuZCmsiH9Iams25FI&m=7rSbEYzyMxSQsFDzuOl4TLyppuTOTD3ngLvvt5Igm8k&s=8cSsaCRMHG12uRID-D1Td43XDN5p08pGzW2PfWw9D70&e=>
In .NET (PowerShell): https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/standard/base-types/custom-date-and-time-format-strings<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__docs.microsoft.com_en-2Dus_dotnet_standard_base-2Dtypes_custom-2Ddate-2Dand-2Dtime-2Dformat-2Dstrings&d=DwMFaQ&c=eIGjsITfXP_y-DLLX0uEHXJvU8nOHrUK8IrwNKOtkVU&r=S-aLwpx-PHBTBMIG_c2JczRC0SfuZCmsiH9Iams25FI&m=7rSbEYzyMxSQsFDzuOl4TLyppuTOTD3ngLvvt5Igm8k&s=kq5ilMgfhKTR0NMJOjqktRYO4v7XNRBQouliKtiAZ5M&e=>
We just need a way of specifying the date format we want to use and it could be interpreted by the

ToString
method of the date and time instance that holds the current datetime.

So, to add to what I had in my original post, in client-local.cfg:
Instead of:
log:C:\Temp\myServerLog*.log:10240
If we could to this, it would mean we process a small fraction of the number of files:
log:C:\Temp\myServerLog&DD-&MM-&YY.*.log:10240
This would be interpreted at the client side as (when the date is 2019-01-30):
C:\Temp\myServerLog30-01-19.*.log
Which would find and process, e.g. C:\Temp\myServerLog30-01-19.0.log and C:\Temp\myServerLog30-01-19.1.log

Kind regards,

SebA

On Tue, 29 Jan 2019 at 15:28, SebA <spah at syntec.co.uk<mailto:spah at syntec.co.uk>> wrote:
Hi Zak,

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.

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.

I think being able to configure the scan interval for CPUs would be good.

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.

Kind regards,

SebA

On Tue, 29 Jan 2019 at 11:59, Beck, Zak <zak.beck at accenture.com<mailto:zak.beck at accenture.com>> wrote:
Hi

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):

2019-01-29 11:43:06  Using ASCII encoding
2019-01-29 11:43:06  Connecting to host x.x.x.x
2019-01-29 11:43:06  Sent 100537 bytes to server

We can add a third option to do no encoding I guess.

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).

It may be simpler to add regex processing for your filename issue, I can take a look.

I had to chuckle, I hope you appreciate the irony of saying we’re suffering from feature bloat and then requesting more enhancements / features 😉

Zak

From: Xymon <xymon-bounces at xymon.com<mailto:xymon-bounces at xymon.com>> On Behalf Of SebA
Sent: Monday, 28 January 2019 20:16
To: Xymon Mailing List <xymon at xymon.com<mailto:xymon at xymon.com>>
Subject: [External] [Xymon] Xymon WinPSclient performance

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.

It seems that from version v2.21 a slow ASCII encoding conversion was added:

myServer1 - : xymonclient.ps1  2.21 2017-04-28 zak.beck at accenture.com<mailto:zak.beck at accenture.com>
2019-01-28 19:19:26  Sending to server
2019-01-28 19:19:26  Using ASCII encoding
2019-01-28 19:20:25  Connecting to host x.x.x.x        <-- Yes, that took about 1 minute of 100% processing of 1 of the 8 CPUs/Cores.
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.
2019-01-28 19:20:26  Received 130 bytes from server

Compare with:
myServer1 - : xymonclient.ps1  2.19 2016-12-28 zak.beck at accenture.com<mailto:zak.beck at accenture.com>
2019-01-28 19:15:59  Sending to server
2019-01-28 19:15:59  Connecting to host x.x.x.x
2019-01-28 19:15:59  Sent 2006765 bytes to server
2019-01-28 19:16:00  Received 130 bytes from server

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.

Another slow process is detecting the number of CPUs (on the same server):

2019-01-28 19:29:05  XymonCollectInfo: Process info
2019-01-28 19:29:05  XymonCollectInfo: calling XymonProcsCPUUtilisation
2019-01-28 19:29:05  XymonCollectInfo: CPU info (WMI)
2019-01-28 19:29:13  Found 8 CPUs, total of 0 cores
2019-01-28 19:29:13  XymonCollectInfo: OS info (including memory) (WMI)
2019-01-28 19:29:13  XymonCollectInfo: Service info (WMI)

8 seconds 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.

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
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.
E.g. C:\Temp\myServerLog29-12-18.0.log

In client-local.cfg:
Instead of:
log:C:\Temp\myServerLog*.log:10240
If we could to this, it would mean we process a small fraction of the number of files:
log:C:\Temp\myServerLog&DD-&MM-&YY.*.log:10240

Kind regards,

SebA

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