p4locks

README

p4locks - P4D Table Locking Analyser

Based on the go-libp4dlog library, this tool will parse logs and produce an HTML file with Google Visualisation Chart.

Check the releases page for the latest binary releases.

Credits

Thanks to Daniel Speed @ Zenimax Online Studios https://github.com/Redundancy for the idea and the initial Javascript implementation.

Contents:

• p4locks - P4D Table Locking Analyser
  • Credits
  • Running the lock analyzer
  • Examples
    • Filtering uninteresting records
• Building the p4lock binary

See Project README for instructions as to creating P4LOG files.

Running the lock analyzer

The released binaries for this project are available for Linux/Mac/Windows. After downloading you may want to rename to just p4locks (or p4locks.exe on Windows)

It is a single executable p4locks which will parse a text p4d text log file and generate a single HTML file which can be viewed in a browser. This HTML file includes Google Charting library and displays the output visually.

$ ./p4locks -h
usage: p4locks [<flags>] [<logfile>...]

Parses one or more p4d text log files (which may be gzipped) and outputs an HTML file with a Google Charts timeline with
information about locks. Locks are listed by table and then pids with read/write wait/held. The output file can be opened locally
by any browser (although internet access required to download JS).

Examples: p4locks -x user log

Flags:
  -h, --help                     Show context-sensitive help (also try --help-long and --help-man).
      --debug=DEBUG              Enable debugging level.
  -t, --threshold=THRESHOLD      Threshold value below which commands are filtered out (in milliseconds). Default 10000
  -o, --html.output=HTML.OUTPUT  Name of file to which to write HTML. Defaults to <logfile-prefix>.html
  -x, --exclude.tables=EXCLUDE.TABLES
                                 Specify a (golang) regex to match tables to exclude from results (e.g. 'user$' or
                                 '(user|nameval)$'). No default.
      --version                  Show application version.

Args:
  [<logfile>]  Log files to process.

Examples

p4locks log2020-02-01.log

will produce a log2020-02-01.html (stripping off .gz and .log from name and appending .html).

Also possible to parse multiple log files in one go:

p4locks -o logs.html log2020-02-*

Excluding a table (db.user) and setting threshold to 20s for lock wait/held:

p4locks -t 20000 -x user log

Filtering uninteresting records

You may find rather large output files which take a long time to load in a browser and contain a lot of uninteresting data. The easiest way to filter this is to:

• Increase the threshold value (filtering out locks wait/held for less time)
• Filter out uninteresting tables

The former is easy via -t/--threshold, e.g.

p4locks -t 30000 log

will leave only commands with lock wait/held > 30s (30,000 ms).

For uninteresting tables, consider counting them and then filtering them out. E.g.

p4locks -t 30000 log
grep Table log.html | cut -d',' -f1 | sort | uniq -c | sort -n -k 1,1

You can count the data entries, e.g.

grep -c Table log.html

Filter out unwanted tables, e.g.

p4locks -t 30000 -x "(trigger|monitor|group|protect|user|ticket|domain)" log

This will result in a potentially much smaller log.html file.

Building the p4lock binary

See the Makefile:

make

or

make dist

The latter will cross compile to create gzipped output files in the bin directory.