How to use strace in ClickHouse
strace can also be used to analyze the behavior of a ClickHouse server and identify performance bottlenecks. Here are some steps to use strace for analyzing ClickHouse:
- Identify the ClickHouse process you want to trace. You can use the command ps aux | grep clickhouse-server to find the process ID (PID) of the ClickHouse server.
- Run strace on the ClickHouse process. The basic syntax is strace -p <PID>, where PID is the process ID of the ClickHouse server.
- Analyze the strace output. The output will show the system calls and signals made by the ClickHouse server, along with the corresponding return values.
- Look for patterns in the output that indicate performance bottlenecks. For example, if you see many system calls to open, read, or write files, it may indicate that the server is experiencing heavy I/O wait. If you see many system calls to mmap, it may indicate that the server is experiencing heavy memory usage.
- Use the -c option, this command will show statistics of time spent in each system call.
- Use the -T option, this command will show the time spent in user mode and kernel mode for each system call.
Conclusion
It is worth noting that analyzing strace output for ClickHouse can be complex and requires a good understanding of ClickHouse internals and Linux system calls. Additionally, running strace on a production server can cause a significant performance overhead. It’s best to use strace on non-production environments or during maintenance windows to avoid impacting the performance of your ClickHouse server.
To read more on Monitoring in ClickHouse, do consider reading the below articles
- ClickHouse Monitoring: Tracing ClickHouse with OpenTelemetry
- ClickHouse Monitoring: Tracking Key Activities by ClickHouse Users
- ClickHouse Monitoring: Configuring ClickHouse Server Logs in JSON Format
