JRUN process eats up 100% CPU - coldfusion

We regularly encounter performance issues with ColdFusion 8.
On a farm of 3 front end servers, one gets unavailable: for some reason, the CPU goes 100% (on one core) and never goes down. When checking on Windows task manager, it appears the the jrun process is using 100% of on CPU.
do someone have a clue on how to start troubleshooting that?
How to figure out what's causing the spike in first place.
I'm a lot more into .net and feels a bit lost when it comes to java/jrun troubleshooting.
Our configuration is currently:
CF 8 running on Windows 2008 R2 64 bits with Oracle 11g client, with 4GB RAM and a dual core CPU.

Are you using client variables? Triple check your code and if you are ensure they are not set in the registry but a database.

Have a look on this issue
Strange JRUN issue. JRUN eating up 50% of memory for every two hours
I was facing 50% of CPU usage on regular interval and it was due to client variable stored in registry. Even though you aren't using client variable but it stored in registry without your knowledge due setting added in Application.cfc/.cfm file.
Also try to figure out which thread causing issue and get stracktrace of it will help you lot to investigate more on this. In above link's answer I have posted link of my blog post and explain about how you can use visualvm and jconsole to get stacktrace of your evil thread.
Hope this help.

More information is going to be needed. When you say 4 gigs of RAM you mean a 4Gig heap right? Or are you actually running a 4Gig 64bit OS? If so you should consider getting a bit more. CF 64bit uses something like 80% more RAM for the equivalent effect - in other words, a 2gig 64bit heap is the rough equivalent of a 1gig 32 bit heap.
Having said that I would not take any blanket advice about your heap size from any of us who have not actually looked at your system. Tuning the JVM requires experience its true - but it also requires practical knowledge of the system, expected traffic etc.
My other comment would be that you should definitely check the client vars. The fact that 1 core is seized up makes me think the purge task is hanging (most likely due to Client vars in the registry as Paul said. Or perhaps a scheduled task (cf monitor or fusion reactor could help tease out the request(s) that are running).
There's another stack overflow thread with some additional help on it. Ignore all that stack trace stuff and take a look at the specific "areas to examine". Build your list of stuff to try and then order by ease of implementation (or likelyhood of cause) and start trying to eliminate items as possibilities of the list.

If it's only one server, and you're certain that the code-bases are identical, I'd go into the cfadmin for the bad server and one of the good servers and do a line-by-line comparison of the Settings Summary. Make sure there aren't any glaring differences between the setups. Pay special attention to the versions of the DB drivers.
You also don't mention whether or not the server hardware configurations are the same. As Mark pointed out, 4 gig RAM is probably not sufficient for a 64-bit install. RAM is cheap. RAM is your friend. Get more.

Related

Interlocked API between Windows CE 5 and 6

I'm currently porting a VS2005 C++ application from CE5 to CE6 and I'm experiencing severe performance problems. This goes so far that a single HTTP request retrieving dynamic content takes 40ms on CE5 and 350ms on CE6. These values used to be worse due to a bunch of inefficiencies that I already cleaned up, improving performance on both systems, but at the moment I'm stuck at that latency. For the record, both tests are made on the same machine and the webserver is not the one supplied with CE but a custom one implemented in C++. Note also that the problem is not the network IO, CE6 even outperforms CE5 on the same machine when serving static files, but it's the dynamic content handling.
While trying to figure out why the program performs so badly, I stumbled across something that puzzled me: Under CE5, the Interlocked* API for x86 use neither the compiler intrinsics nor real function calls but inline assembly code. This code has a comment saying that the intrinsic includes lock prefixes that are only required for multi-processor systems and that slow down code running on just a single core like CE5. On CE6, these functions are implemented using the compiler intrinsics including the lock prefix. Since these functions are used by e.g. Boost and STLport, both of which are used inside the webserver, I was wondering if those could be the culprit.
Another thing I noticed was that some string parsing functions take extremely long. Worse, it seems that calling the same function a second time after the first time takes less time, so it seems as if some kind of caching was going on. Since this is a short (<1kB) string received via TCP that is parsed in memory, I can't imagine which cache could be responsible for that. The only cache could be the instruction cache, but the program is not larger than the CE5 version and if the code was running from uncached memory it would not show these caching effects.
TLDR - Questions:
Is CE6 capable of handling multiple processors at all?
Is there an easy way to tell the compiler that it should omit the lock prefix? My current approach to achieve that is to simply copy the inline assembly from the CE5 SDK, but that's beyond ugly.
I'd also appreciate any other suggestions what to look at or what to try. Many thanks in advance!
Summary There is no problem that depends on the executable, let alone on the Interlocked API. Running the same executable proved that. However, running on a different machine with a different platform setup made a difference. We're now back to Platform Builder, trying to figure out the differences between the two platforms.
No. WEC7 is required for SMP support. Most likely in CE6 the OEM has disabled the other cores.
None that I am aware of.
Either use the performance profiling tools or instrument your code with timing calls to narrow down where things are taking too long.
I have finally found the reason for the performance behaviour, it's simply paging. CE6 has a pool manager (see http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ce_base/archive/2008/01/19/paging-and-the-windows-ce-paging-pool.aspx) which handles paging out unused mapped DLLs and EXEs. When the amount of mapped binaries exceeds a certain size, it starts (with low priority) to page out memory. The limit when it starts paging out is just 3MiB by default, which is rather low for current applications. Also, the cache is not an LRU cache but simply discarding the pages in the order they were loaded.
It turns out that our system exceeded this limit, which causes the paging to begin. Due to the algorithm used, it will always throw out used ones that will then have to be paged in again. The code that serves static files is small, so this wasn't affected as much by this limit. The code that serves dynamic pages is much larger though, so it wreaks havoc on the overall system with IO. This also explains why the problem couldn't be attributed to a specific piece of code, it wasn't the code itself but loading it.
I have detected this via IOCTL_HAL_GET_POOL_PARAMETERS, which gave me the relevant configuration parameters, current state, how often the pageout-thread ran and for how long (although the latter is only the time it took to swap out pages). I should be able to find the resulting page faults in the kernel tracker, too, now that I know what I'm looking for. I could also observe that the activity LED on the CF card adapter now lights up when first loading a file, but not on subsequent requests, where it is taken from cache. This used to always cause the LED to flash on dynamic pages.
The simple solution is to increase the limit for the pool manager, so it doesn't start throwing out things. This can be done easily in config.bib by patching kernel.dll with the according values. Alternatively, reducing the executable size would help, but that's not so easy.

Finding heap corruption

This is an extension of my previous question, Application crash with no explanation.
I have a lot of crashes that are presumably caused by heap corruption on an application server. These crashes only occur in production; they cannot be reproduced in a test environment.
I'm looking for a way to track down these crashes.
Application Verifier was suggested, and it would be fine, but it's unusable with our production server. When we try to start it in production with application verifier, it becomes so slow that it's completely unusable, even though this is a fairly powerful server (64-bit application, 16 GB memory, 8 processors). Running it without application verifier, it only uses about 1 GB of memory and no more than 10-15% of any processor's cycles.
Are there any other tools that will help find heap corruption, without adding a huge overhead?
Use the debug version of the Microsoft runtime libraries. Turn on red-zoning and get your heap automatically checked every 128 (say) heap operations by calling _CrtSetDbgFlag() once during initialisation.
_CRTDBG_DELAY_FREE_MEM_DF can be quite useful for finding memory-used-after-free bugs, but your heap size grows monitonically while using it.
Would there be any benefit in running it virtualized and taking scheduled snapshots, so that you hopefully can get a snapshot just a little before it actually crashes? Then take the pre-crash snapshot and start it in a lab environment. If you can get it to crash again there, restart the snapshot and start inspecting your server process.
Mudflap with GCC. It does code instrumentation for production code.
You have to compile your soft with -fmudflap. It will check any wrong pointer access (heap/stack/static). It is designed to work for production code with a little slowdown (between x1.5 to x5). You can also disable check at read access for speedup.

What to do when an out-of-memory error occurs? [duplicate]

This question already has answers here:
Closed 12 years ago.
Possible Duplicate:
What's the graceful way of handling out of memory situations in C/C++?
Hi,
this seems to be a simple question a first glance. And I don't want to start a huge discussion on what-is-the-best-way-to-do-this....
Context: Windows >= 5, 32 bit, C++, Windows SDK / Win32 API
But after asking a similar question, I read some MSDN and about the Win32 memory management, so now I'm even more confused on what to do if an allocation fails, let's say the C++ new operator.
So I'm very interested now in how you implement (and implicitly, if you do implement) an error handling for OOM in your applications.
If, where (main function?), for which operations (allocations) , and how you handle an OOM error.
(I don't really mean that subjectively, turning this into a question of preference, I just like to see different approaches that account for different conditions or fit different situations. So feel free to offer answers for GUI apps, services - user-mode stuff ....)
Some exemplary reactions to OOM to show what I mean:
GUI app: Message box, exit process
non-GUI app: Log error, exit process
service: try to recover, e.g. kill the thread that raised an exception, but continue execution
critical app: try again until an allocation succeeds (reducing the requested amount of memory)
hands from OOM, let STL / boost / OS handle it
Thank you for your answers!
The best-explained way will receive the great honour of being an accepted answer :D - even if it only consists of a MessageBox line, but explains why evering else was useless, wrong or unneccessary.
Edit: I appreciate your answers so far, but I'm missing a bit of an actual answer; what I mean is most of you say don't mind OOM since you can't do anything when there's no memory left (system hangs / poor performance). But does that mean to avoid any error handling for OOM? Or only do a simple try-catch in the main showing a MessageBox?
On most modern OSes, OOM will occur long after the system has become completely unusable, since before actually running out, the virtual memory system will start paging physical RAM out to make room for allocating additional virtual memory and in all likelihood the hard disk will begin to thrash like crazy as pages have to be swapped in and out at higher and higher frequencies.
In short, you have much more serious concerns to deal with before you go anywhere near OOM conditions.
Side note: At the moment, the above statement isn't as true as it used to be, since 32-bit machines with loads of physical RAM can exhaust their address space before they start to page. But this is still not common and is only temporary, as 64-bit ramps up and approaches mainstream adoption.
Edit: It seems that 64-bit is already mainstream. While perusing the Dell web site, I couldn't find a single 32-bit system on offer.
You do the exact same thing you do when:
you created 10,000 windows
you allocated 10,000 handles
you created 2,000 threads
you exceeded your quota of kernel pool memory
you filled up the hard disk to capacity.
You send your customer a very humble message where you apologize for writing such crappy code and promise a delivery date for the bug fix. Any else is not nearly good enough. How you want to be notified about it is up to you.
Basically, you should do whatever you can to avoid having the user lose important data. If disk space is available, you might write out recovery files. If you want to be super helpful, you might allocate recovery files while your program is open, to ensure that they will be available in case of emergency.
Simply display a message or dialog box (depending on whether your in a terminal or window system), saying "Error: Out of memory", possibly with debugging info, and include an option for your user to file a bug report, or a web link to where they can do that.
If your really out of memory then, in all honesty, there's no point doing anything other than gracefully exiting, trying to handle the error is useless as there is nothing you can do.
In my case, what happens when you have an app that fragments the memory up so much it cannot allocate the contiguous block needed to process the huge amount of nodes?
Well, I split the processing up as much as I could.
For OOM, you can do the same thing, chop your processes up into as many pieces as possible and do them sequentially.
Of course, for handling the error until you get to fix it (if you can!), you typically let it crash. Then you determine that those memory allocs are failing (like you never expected) and put a error message direct to the user along the lines of "oh dear, its all gone wrong. log a call with the support dept". In all cases, you inform the user however you like. Though, its established practice to use whatever mechanism the app currently uses - if it writes to a log file, do that, if it displays an error dialog, do the same, if it uses the Windows 'send info to microsoft' dialog, go right ahead and let that be the bearer of bad tidings - users are expecting it, so don't try to be clever and do something else.
It depends on your app, your skill level, and your time. If it needs to be running 24/7 then obviously you must handle it. It depends on the situation. Perhaps it may be possible to try a slower algorithm but one that requires less heap. Maybe you can add functionality so that if OOM does occur your app is capable of cleaning itself up, and so you can try again.
So I think the answer is 'ALL OF THE ABOVE!', apart from LET IT CRASH. You take pride in your work, right?
Don't fall into the 'there's loads of memory so it probably won't happen' trap. If every app writer took that attitude you'd see OOM far more often, and not all apps are running on a desktop machines, take a mobile phone for example, it's highly likely for you to run into OOM on a RAM starved platform like that, trust me!
If all else fails display a useful message (assuming there's enough memory for a MessageBox!)

How to optimize paging for large in memory database

I have an application where the entire database is implemented in memory using a stl-map for each table in the database.
Each item in the stl-map is a complex object with references to other items in the other stl-maps.
The application works with a large amount of data, so it uses more than 500 MByte RAM. Clients are able to contact the application and get a filtered version of the entire database. This is done by running through the entire database, and finding items relevant for the client.
When the application have been running for an hour or so, then Windows 2003 SP2 starts to page out parts of the RAM for the application (Eventhough there is 16 GByte RAM on the machine).
After the application have been partly paged out then a client logon takes a long time (10 mins) because it now generates a page fault for each pointer lookup in the stl-map. If running the client logon a second time right after then it is fast (few secs) because all the memory is now back in RAM.
I can see it is possible to tell Windows to lock memory in RAM, but this is generally only recommended for device drivers, and only for "small" amounts of memory.
I guess a poor mans solution could be to loop through the entire memory database, and thus tell Windows we are still interested in keeping the datamodel in RAM.
I guess another poor mans solution could be to disable the pagefile completely on Windows.
I guess the expensive solution would be a SQL database, and then rewrite the entire application to use a database layer. Then hopefully the database system will have implemented means to for fast access.
Are there other more elegant solutions ?
This sounds like either a memory leak, or a serious fragmentation problem. It seems to me that the first step would be to figure out what's causing 500 Mb of data to use up 16 Gb of RAM and still want more.
Edit: Windows has a working set trimmer that actively attempts to page out idle data. The basic idea is that it goes through and marks pages as being available, but leaves the data in them (and the virtual memory manager knows what data is in them). If, however, you attempt to access that memory before it's allocated to other purposes, it'll be marked as being in use again, which will normally prevent it from being paged out.
If you really think this is the source of your problem, you can indirectly control the working set trimmer by calling SetProcessWorkingSetSize. At least in my experience, this is only rarely of much use, but you may be in one of those unusual situations where it's really helpful.
As #Jerry Coffin said, it really sounds like your actual problem is a memory leak. Fix that.
But for the record, none of your "poor mans solutions" would work. At all.
Windows pages out some of your data because there's not room for it in RAM.
Looping through the entire memory database would load in every byte of the data model, yes... which would cause other parts of it to be paged out. In the end, you'd generate a lot of page faults, and the only difference in the end would be which parts of the data structure are paged out.
Disabling the page file? Yes, if you think a hard crash is better than low performance. Windows doesn't page data out because it's fun. It does that to handle situations where it would otherwise run out of memory. If you disable the pagefile, the app will just crash when it would otherwise page out data.
If your dataset really is so big it doesn't fit in memory, then I don't see why an SQL database would be especially "expensive". Unlike your current solution, databases are optimized for this purpose. They're meant to handle datasets too large to fit in memory, and to do this efficiently.
It sounds like you have a memory leak. Fixing that would be the elegant, efficient and correct solution.
If you can't do that, then either
throw more RAM at the problem (the app ends up using 16GB? Throw 32 or 64GB at it then), or
switch to a format that's optimized for efficient disk access (A SQL database probably)
We have a similar problem and the solution we choose was to allocate everything in a shared memory block. AFAIK, Windows doesn't page this out. However, using stl-map here is not for faint of heart either and was beyond what we required.
We are using Boost Shared Memory to implement this for us and it works well. Follow examples closely and you will be up and running quickly. Boost also has Boost.MultiIndex that will do a lot of what you want.
For a no cost sql solution have you looked at Sqlite? They have an option to run as an in memory database.
Good luck, sounds like an interesting application.
I have an application where the entire
database is implemented in memory
using a stl-map for each table in the
database.
That's the start of the end: STL's std::map is extremely memory inefficient. Same applies to std::list. Every element would be allocated separately causing rather serious memory waste. I often use std::vector + sort() + find() instead of std::map in applications where it is possible (more searches than modifications) and I know in advance memory usage might become an issue.
When the application have been running
for an hour or so, then Windows 2003
SP2 starts to page out parts of the
RAM for the application (Eventhough
there is 16 GByte RAM on the machine).
Hard to tell without knowing how your application is written. Windows has the feature to unload from RAM whatever memory of idle applications can be unloaded. But that normally affects memory mapped files and alike.
Otherwise, I would strongly suggest to read up the Windows memory management documentation . It is not very easy to understand, yet Windows has all sorts and types of memory available to applications. I never had luck with it, but probably in your application using custom std::allocator would work.
I can believe it is the fault of flawed pagefile behaviour -i've run my laptops mostly with pagefile turned off since nt4.0. In my experience, at least up to XP Pro, Windows intrusively swaps pages out just to provide the dubious benefit of having a really-really-slow extension to the maximum working set space.
Ask what benefit swapping to harddisk is achieving with 16 Gigabityes of real RAM available? If your working set it so big as to need more virtual memory than +10 Gigs, then once swapping is actualy required processes will take anything from a bit longer, to thousands of times longer to complete. On Windows the untameable file system cache seems to antagonise the relationships.
Now when I (very) occasionaly run out of working set on my XP laptops, there is no traffic jam, the guilty app just crashes. A utility to suspend memory glugging processes before that time and make an alert would be nice, but there is no such thing just a violation, a crash, and sometimes explorer.exe goes down too.
Pagefiles - who needs em'
---- Edit
Given snakefoot explanation, the problem is swapping out memory that is not used for a longer period of time and due to this not having the data in memory when needed. This is the same as this:
Can I tell Windows not to swap out a particular processes’ memory?
and VirtualLock function should do its job:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366895(VS.85).aspx
---- Previous answer
First of all you need to distinguish between memory leak and memory need problems.
If you have a memory leak then it would be bigger effort to convert entire application to SQL than to debug the application.
SQL cannot be faster then a well designed, domain specific in-memory database and if you have bugs, chances are you will have different ones in an SQL version as well.
If this is a memory need problem, then you will need to switch to SQL anyway and this sounds like a good moment.

Random Complete System Unresponsiveness Running Mathematical Functions

I have a program that loads a file (anywhere from 10MB to 5GB) a chunk at a time (ReadFile), and for each chunk performs a set of mathematical operations (basically calculates the hash).
After calculating the hash, it stores info about the chunk in an STL map (basically <chunkID, hash>) and then writes the chunk itself to another file (WriteFile).
That's all it does. This program will cause certain PCs to choke and die. The mouse begins to stutter, the task manager takes > 2 min to show, ctrl+alt+del is unresponsive, running programs are slow.... the works.
I've done literally everything I can think of to optimize the program, and have triple-checked all objects.
What I've done:
Tried different (less intensive) hashing algorithms.
Switched all allocations to nedmalloc instead of the default new operator
Switched from stl::map to unordered_set, found the performance to still be abysmal, so I switched again to Google's dense_hash_map.
Converted all objects to store pointers to objects instead of the objects themselves.
Caching all Read and Write operations. Instead of reading a 16k chunk of the file and performing the math on it, I read 4MB into a buffer and read 16k chunks from there instead. Same for all write operations - they are coalesced into 4MB blocks before being written to disk.
Run extensive profiling with Visual Studio 2010, AMD Code Analyst, and perfmon.
Set the thread priority to THREAD_MODE_BACKGROUND_BEGIN
Set the thread priority to THREAD_PRIORITY_IDLE
Added a Sleep(100) call after every loop.
Even after all this, the application still results in a system-wide hang on certain machines under certain circumstances.
Perfmon and Process Explorer show minimal CPU usage (with the sleep), no constant reads/writes from disk, few hard pagefaults (and only ~30k pagefaults in the lifetime of the application on a 5GB input file), little virtual memory (never more than 150MB), no leaked handles, no memory leaks.
The machines I've tested it on run Windows XP - Windows 7, x86 and x64 versions included. None have less than 2GB RAM, though the problem is always exacerbated under lower memory conditions.
I'm at a loss as to what to do next. I don't know what's causing it - I'm torn between CPU or Memory as the culprit. CPU because without the sleep and under different thread priorities the system performances changes noticeably. Memory because there's a huge difference in how often the issue occurs when using unordered_set vs Google's dense_hash_map.
What's really weird? Obviously, the NT kernel design is supposed to prevent this sort of behavior from ever occurring (a user-mode application driving the system to this sort of extreme poor performance!?)..... but when I compile the code and run it on OS X or Linux (it's fairly standard C++ throughout) it performs excellently even on poor machines with little RAM and weaker CPUs.
What am I supposed to do next? How do I know what the hell it is that Windows is doing behind the scenes that's killing system performance, when all the indicators are that the application itself isn't doing anything extreme?
Any advice would be most welcome.
I know you said you had monitored memory usage and that it seems minimal here, but the symptoms sound very much like the OS thrashing like crazy, which would definitely cause general loss of OS responsiveness like you're seeing.
When you run the application on a file say 1/4 to 1/2 the size of available physical memory, does it seem to work better?
What I suspect may be happening is that Windows is "helpfully" caching your disk reads into memory and not giving up that cache memory to your application for use, forcing it to go to swap. Thus, even though swap use is minimal (150MB), it's going in and out constantly as you calculate the hash. This then brings the system to its knees.
Some things to check:
Antivirus software. These often scan files as they're opened to check for viruses. Is your delay occuring before any data is read by the application?
General system performance. Does copying the file using Explorer also show this problem?
Your code. Break it down into the various stages. Write a program that just reads the file, then one that reads and writes the files, then one that just hashes random blocks of ram (i.e. remove the disk IO part) and see if any particular step is problematic. If you can get a profiler then use this as well to see if there any slow spots in your code.
EDIT
More ideas. Perhaps your program is holding on to the GDI lock too much. This would explain everything else being slow without high CPU usage. Only one app at a time can have the GDI lock. Is this a GUI app, or just a simple console app?
You also mentioned RtlEnterCriticalSection. This is a costly operation, and can hang the system quite easily, i.e. mismatched Enters and Leaves. Are you multi-threading at all? Is the slow down due to race conditions between threads?
XPerf is your guide here - watch the PDC Video about it, and then take a trace of the misbehaving app. It will tell you exactly what's happening throughout the system, it is extremely powerful.
I like the disk-caching/thrashing suggestions, but if that's not it, here are some scattershot suggestions:
What non-MSVC libraries, if any, are you linking to?
Can your program be modified (#ifdef'd) to run without a GUI? Does the problem occur?
You added ::Sleep(100) after each loop in each thread, right? How many threads are you talking about? A handful or hundreds? How long does each loop take, roughly? What happens if you make that ::Sleep(10000)?
Is your program perhaps doing something else that locks a limited resources (ProcExp can show you what handles are being acquired ... of course you might have difficulty with ProcExp not responding:-[)
Are you sure CriticalSections are userland-only? I recall that was so back when I worked on Windows (or so I believed), but Microsoft could have modified that. I don't see any guarantee in the MSDN article Critical Section Objects (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms682530%28VS.85%29.aspx) ... and this leads me to wonder: Anti-convoy locks in Windows Server 2003 SP1 and Windows Vista
Hmmm... presumably we're all multi-processor now, so are you setting the spin count on the CS?
How about running a debugging version of one of these OSes and monitoring the kernel debugging output (using DbgView)... possibly using the kernel debugger from the Platform SDK ... if MS still calls it that?
I wonder whether VMMap (another SysInternal/MS utility) might help with the Disk caching hypothesis.
It turns out that this is a bug in the Visual Studio compiler. Using a different compiler resolves the issue entirely.
In my case, I installed and used the Intel C++ Compiler and even with all optimizations disabled I did not see the fully-system hang that I was experiencing w/ the Visual Studio 2005 - 2010 compilers on this library.
I'm not certain as to what is causing the compiler to generate such broken code, but it looks like we'll be buying a copy of the Intel compiler.
It sounds like you're poking around fixing things without knowing what the problem is. Take stackshots. They will tell you what your program is doing when the problem occurs. It might not be easy to get the stackshots if the problem occurs on other machines where you cannot use an IDE or a stack sampler. One possibility is to kill the app and get a stack dump when it's acting up. You need to reproduce the problem in an environment where you can get a stack dump.
Added: You say it performs well on OSX and Linux, and poorly on Windows. I assume the ratio of completion time is some fairly large number, like 10 or 100, if you've even had the patience to wait for it. I said this in the comment, but it is a key point. The program is waiting for something, and you need to find out what. It could be any of the things people mentioned, but it is not random.
Every program, all the time while it runs, has a call stack consisting of a hierarchy of call instructions at specific addresses. If at a point in time it is calculating, the last instruction on the stack is a non-call instruction. If it is in I/O the stack may reach into a few levels of library calls that you can't see into. That's OK. Every call instruction on the stack is waiting. It is waiting for the work it requested to finish. If you look at the call stack, and look at where the call instructions are in your code, you will know what your program is waiting for.
Your program, since it is taking so long to complete, is spending nearly all of its time waiting for something to finish, and as I said, that's what you need to find out. Get a stack dump while it's being slow, and it will give you the answer. The chance that it will miss it is 1/the-slowness-ratio.
Sorry to be so elemental about this, but lots of people (and profiler makers) don't get it. They think they have to measure.