We recently decided to enable GC logging for Hadoop MapReduce2 History Server on a number of clusters (exact version varies) as a aid to looking into history-server-related memory and garbage collection problems. While doing this, we want to avoid two problems we know might happen:
When Java GC logging starts for a process it seems to replace the content of any file that has the same name. This means that unless you are careful, you will lose the GC logging, perhaps when you are more likely to need it.
If you keep the cluster running long enough, log files will fill up disk unless managed. Even if GC logging is not currently voluminous we want to manage the risk of an unusual situation arising that causes the logging rate to suddenly spike up.
You will need to set some JVM parameters when starting the MapReduce2 History Server, meaning you need to make some changes to mapred-env.sh. You could set the parameters in HADOOP_OPTS, but that would have a broader impact than just the History server, so instead you will probably want to set them in HADOOP_JOB_HISTORYSERVER_OPTS.
Now lets discuss the JVM parameters to include in those.
To enable GC logging to a file, you will need to add -verbose:gc -Xloggc:<log-file-location>.
You need to give the log file name special consideration to prevent overwrites whenever the server is restarted. It seems like you need to have a unique name for every invocation so appending a timestamp seems like the best option. You can include something like `date +'%Y%m%d%H%M'` to add a timestamp. In this example, it is in the form of YYYYMMDDHHMM. In some versions of Java you can put "%t" in your log file location and it will be replaced by the server start up timestamp formatted as YYYY-MM-DD_HH-MM-SS.
Now onto managing use of disk space. I'll be happy if there is a simpler way than what I have.
First, take advantage of Java's built-in GC log file rotation. -XX:+UseGCLogFileRotation -XX:NumberOfGCLogFiles=10 -XX:GCLogFileSize=10M is an example of enabling this rotation, having up to 10 GC log files from the JVM, each of which is no more than approx 10MB in size. 10 x 10MB is 100MB max usage.
With the GC log file rotation in place with up to 10 files, '.0', '.1', ... '.9' will be added to the file name you gave in Xloggc. .0 will be first and after it reaches .9 it will replace .0 and continue on in a round robin manner. In some versions of Java '.current' will be additionally put on the end of the name of the log file currently being written to.
Due to the unique file naming we apparently have to have to avoid overwrites, you can have 100MB per History server invocation, so this is not a total solution to managing disk space used by the server's GC logs. You will end up with a set of up to 10 GC log files on each server invocation -- this can add up over time. The best solution (under *nix) to that would seem to be to use the logrotate utility (or some other utility) to periodically clean up the GC logs that have not been modified in the last N days.
Be sure to do the math and make sure you will have enough disk space.
People frequently want more details and context in their GC logs than the default, so consider adding in -XX:+PrintGCDetails -XX:+PrintGCTimeStamps -XX:+PrintGCDateStamps.
Putting this together, you might add something this to mapred-env:
## enable GC logging for MR2 History Server:
TIMESTAMP=`date +'%Y%m%d%H%M'`
# GC log location/name prior to .n addition by log rotation
JOB_HISTORYSERVER_GC_LOG_NAME="{{mapred_log_dir_prefix}}/$USER/mapred-jobhistory-gc.log-$TIMESTAMP"
JOB_HISTORYSERVER_GC_LOG_ENABLE_OPTS="-verbose:gc -Xloggc:$JOB_HISTORYSERVER_GC_LOG_NAME"
JOB_HISTORYSERVER_GC_LOG_ROTATION_OPTS="-XX:+UseGCLogFileRotation -XX:NumberOfGCLogFiles=10 -XX:GCLogFileSize=10M"
JOB_HISTORYSERVER_GC_LOG_FORMAT_OPTS="-XX:+PrintGCDetails -XX:+PrintGCTimeStamps -XX:+PrintGCDateStamps"
JOB_HISTORYSERVER_GC_LOG_OPTS="$JOB_HISTORYSERVER_GC_LOG_ENABLE_OPTS $JOB_HISTORYSERVER_GC_LOG_ROTATION_OPTS $JOB_HISTORYSERVER_GC_LOG_FORMAT_OPTS"
export HADOOP_JOB_HISTORYSERVER_OPTS="$HADOOP_JOB_HISTORYSERVER_OPTS $JOB_HISTORYSERVER_GC_LOG_OPTS"
You may find that you already have a reference to HADOOP_JOB_HISTORYSERVER_OPTS so you should replace or add onto that.
In the above, you can change {{mapred_log_dir_prefix}}/$USER to wherever you want the GC logs to go (you probably want it to go the the same place as MapReduce history server logs). You can change the log file naming too.
If you are managing your Hadoop cluster with Apache Ambari, then these changes would be in MapReduce2 service > Configs > Advanced > Advanced mapred-env > mapred-env template. With Ambari, {{mapred_log_dir_prefix}} will be automatically replaced with the Mapreduce Log Dir Prefix defined a few rows above the field.
GC logging will start happening upon server restart the server, so you may need to have a short outage to enable this.