Anonymization of argus flow data

Carter Bullard carter at qosient.com
Tue Sep 10 11:40:24 EDT 2013 

Hey Kaustubh,
I've been profiling ranonymize() with a lot of data, and
while I do see opportunities to improve performance, I don't
see many massively inefficient parts of the code, when run
against my data sets.  There are still some things for
me to look at, so I wanted you to know that I'm working on
your problem. 

Based on what you've seen me so far, you're machine is 85%
idle, is ranonymize() using 100% of a single core, or is it
sleeping a lot?

What kind of machine are you running on??  Can you describe the
machine a bit?  CPUs, memory, disks, etc….

Carter


On Sep 3, 2013, at 3:05 PM, Kaustubh Gadkari <kaustubh at cs.colostate.edu> wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 3, 2013 at 12:33 PM, Carter Bullard <carter at qosient.com> wrote:
>> Hmmmmmm, well, you're not using the machine much (85% idle)
>> so I'm looking into whether we're making any calls to any
>> routines that would add some wait states, like name lookups, or
>> sleeping somewhere.
>> 
>> Lets assume that there is a big problem, and I'll try to make
>> some changes to improve your performance.
>> 
> 
> Thanks, Carter.
> 
> Kaustubh
> 
>> Carter
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Sep 3, 2013, at 1:57 PM, Kaustubh Gadkari <kaustubh at cs.colostate.edu> wrote:
>> 
>>> Hey Carter,
>>> 
>>> On Sep 3, 2013, at 11:36 AM, Carter Bullard <carter at qosient.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Hey Kaustubh,
>>>> If its still writing records to the output file, its not in an infinite loop,
>>>> although I'm sure that it feels like one.  So, no need to print debug msgs
>>>> or run under gdb().
>>>> 
>>>> Hmmmmmm, you must have a very large number of IP addresses.  racount() isn't doing
>>>> anything exotic with the "-M addr" mode.  Its hashing and storing each unique
>>>> IP address, so that we can report on how many and what types.
>>>> 
>>>> My guess is that you must be short on physical memory, and the programs are swapping,
>>>> which means that everything on this machine will be going very slowly.
>>>> Run " top " to see if one of our programs is eating all the memory, or
>>>> use vmstat() or vm_stat() or whatever to see if there is any paging.
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> No, the machine is not running out of memory. ranonymize is the largest memory user, and it is using 42.1% of a total of 32GB RAM. The swap usage is only 205MB, which is OK.  vmstat shows me the following:
>>> 
>>> kaustubh at proton:~$ sudo vmstat -w
>>> procs -------------------memory------------------ ---swap-- -----io---- --system-- -----cpu-------
>>> r  b       swpd       free       buff      cache   si   so    bi    bo   in   cs  us sy  id wa st
>>> 1  0     205916    1638176     101636   16287400    0    0   527   342    1    1  14  0  85  1  0
>>> 
>>> There are no other memory intensive processes running on the box.
>>> 
>>>> If it is a memory problem, then you will need to subdivide the data based
>>>> on size, not on time, using rasplit().  And yes its easy to merge split files
>>>> back to a single file.
>>>> 
>>>> UNFORTUNATELY, because the scope of anonymization is the file, anonymizing a
>>>> single big file of records will generate different results compared to
>>>> anonymizing a set of split files created from the big file.  Address A will be
>>>> anonymized potentially to a different address in each file.
>>>> 
>>>> The configuration provides the means to get consistent results between files,
>>>> but its a bit of work to do so.
>>>> 
>>>> Do you think you're running out of memory?
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> No, I think I'm ok in terms of memory usage.
>>> 
>>> Kaustubh
>>> 
>>>> Carter
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> On Sep 3, 2013, at 1:11 PM, Kaustubh Gadkari <kaustubh.gadkari at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> On Tue, Sep 3, 2013 at 8:49 AM, Carter Bullard <carter at qosient.com> wrote:
>>>>>> Hmmm, if racount() takes 18min, I would think ranonymize() should take about 20min
>>>>>> to complete.   You can run " racount -M addr " to get racount() to printout address
>>>>>> information, like how many addresses are in the file.
>>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> Carter, I ran racount with -M addr, but the process hasn't finished
>>>>> yet (it's been running for about 90 min now). I'll let it run for a
>>>>> while longer and keep you updated.
>>>>> 
>>>>>> ranonymize() works on a single argus record at a time, reading a single record,
>>>>>> anonymizing all the various data elements, and then writing the anonymized
>>>>>> record out to the output file.  If ranonymize() hasn't written out a record recently,
>>>>>> then its possible that its in an infinite loop, especially if its running at 100%, and
>>>>>> its been running for a month, and it seems to have stopped writing into the file.
>>>>>> What was the last " modified " time on your output file ???
>>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> It hasn't stopped writing to file .. the last modified time is right
>>>>> now, since the process is still running.
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>>> If you've compiled debug support into your ra* programs, you can send a USR1
>>>>>> signal to the running ranonymize() and it will start writing debug information out
>>>>>> to stderr().  Send a USR2 to turn debug output off.  Assuming that ranonymize()s
>>>>>> process id is 35122, you can do this:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> % kill -USR1 35122
>>>>>> % kill -USR2 35122
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> If you've compiled development support into your programs, you can attach
>>>>>> to ranonymize() using gdb(), and then step through the program to see where
>>>>>> it is.
>>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> I haven't compiled my ra* programs with debug or development support.
>>>>> If you can tell me what I need to change in the Makefiles, I can do so
>>>>> and run ranonymize with gdb and see what's happening.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Kaustubh
>>>>> 
>>>>>> % gdb ranonymize 35122
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> This will attach to the program, and stop the acitve process.  If this all seems
>>>>>> unfamiliar, send more email, and I'll walk you through one of these strategies.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Carter
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> On Sep 3, 2013, at 9:56 AM, Kaustubh Gadkari <kaustubh.gadkari at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> On Tue, Sep 3, 2013 at 7:19 AM, Kaustubh Gadkari
>>>>>>> <kaustubh.gadkari at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>>>> On Tue, Sep 3, 2013 at 6:00 AM, Carter Bullard <carter at qosient.com> wrote:
>>>>>>>>> Hmmmm,
>>>>>>>>> There shouldn't be any performance issues with anonymizing a file, if your
>>>>>>>>> just
>>>>>>>>> anonymizing the IP addresses.  How many addresses are in the file?
>>>>>>>>> What does your ranonymize.conf file look like?   How much memory is it
>>>>>>>>> using?
>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> I am not quite sure how many IP addresses there are in the file. My
>>>>>>>> ranonymize.conf looks like this:
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> RANON_PRESERVE_ETHERNET_VENDOR=yes
>>>>>>>> RANON_PRESERVE_BROADCAST_ADDRESS=yes
>>>>>>>> RANON_NET_ANONYMIZATION=sequential
>>>>>>>> RANON_HOST_ANONYMIZATION=sequential
>>>>>>>> RANON_PRESERVE_NET_ADDRESS_HIERARCHY=class
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> I took a look at how much memory ranonymize is using .. the usage is
>>>>>>>> about 42% on a machine with 32GB RAM.
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>> ranonymize() can be a little complex O(nLogN + C), but it should be
>>>>>>>>> in the same time frame as racount().  How long does it take for racount()
>>>>>>>>> to read the file?
>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> I am running racount right now .. I will post results once it finishes.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> racount takes about 18min to run on the file:
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> real    17m58.528s
>>>>>>> user    17m12.413s
>>>>>>> sys     2m0.332s
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Kaustubh
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>> Just a rule of thumb. If a ra* program doesn't complete in a few minutes,
>>>>>>>>> you
>>>>>>>>> should stop it and try to figure out if there is a memory problem or not.
>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> Thanks, I'll keep this in mind :)
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> Thanks,
>>>>>>>> Kaustubh
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>> Carter
>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>> On Sep 2, 2013, at 2:20 PM, Kaustubh Gadkari <kaustubh.gadkari at gmail.com>
>>>>>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>> Hi,
>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>> I have a set of argus flow data captured at our data capture vantage point,
>>>>>>>>> and I want to anonymize the IP addresses (both source and destination) fully
>>>>>>>>> i.e. I want to replace both the addresses, using a prefix preserving
>>>>>>>>> technique. I have tried using ranonymize, but it is taking an extremely long
>>>>>>>>> time to anonymize the file (I started the process a couple of months ago, on
>>>>>>>>> a ~125GB file, and the output file size today is only ~30GB).
>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>> Can anyone suggest the right way to go about anonymizing the data set I
>>>>>>>>> have? Is ranonymize the right tool for the job?
>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>> Thanks,
>>>>>>>>> Kaustubh
>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>> --
>>>>>>>>> Kaustubh Gadkari
>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>>> --
>>>>>>>> Kaustubh Gadkari
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> --
>>>>>>> Kaustubh Gadkari
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> --
>>>>> Kaustubh Gadkari
>>>>> 
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> --
>>> Kaustubh Gadkari
>>> kaustubh at cs.colostate.edu
>>> 
>> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Kaustubh Gadkari
> 

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