My Linode crashes when running "sudo perf top"
Linode
Linode Staff
Every time I try to run sudo perf top on my Linode it crashes and gives me the following output:
watchdog: BUG: soft lockup - CPU#0 stuck for 22s! [swapper/0:]
Any ideas what would cause this to happen?
1 Reply
mtcotton846
Linode Staff
So this actually looks to be caused by perf top calling individual kernel processes and consuming a massive amount of resources, which is causing things to crash.
I tested this out on my account by spinning up 1GB, 4GB and 8GB Linodes and running this same command on all three, and the only one that did not have issues is the 8GB Linode. This leads me to to believe this is an issue with the sheer amount of resources top perf consumes.
This theory is also corroborated by several other forum posts in Ubuntu and Stack Exchange:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1875941
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/552757/perf-tool-used-for-profiling-crashes-on-heavy-load
If you wish to perform server monitoring moving forward on these smaller plans I would recommend utilizing one of Linode's other server monitoring tools to achieve the same end.