HANA memory usage details: Part 2 Heap Memory

This is the second part of the blog series of HANA memory usage details and changes in SPS12

For now only the “used memory” part is interesting. May be you heard about “resident memory” => this is the OS view which is a not up-to-date value in cause of the deferred garbage collection / release of memory and can’t be taken as indicator.
“used memory” consists of:

Table Data (Row Store + Column Store + System Tables)
Code and Stack
Database Management / Working Space (heap and shared memory)

SAP HANA Used Memory

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Heap memory
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Content

Column store
Row store indexes
Intermediate results
Temporary structures
SAP HANA page cache

You can check the usage of each area with SQL (see note 1969700 for details) : “HANA_Memory_TopConsumers” (statement adjustment: search for the term “modification section” and adjust AGGREGATE_BY = ‘AREA’):

AREA	DETAIL	NUM	SIZE_GB	SIZE_PCT	CUM_SIZE_PCT
Column store	any	37691	251.89	54.35	54.35
Heap area	any	2692	192.32	41.50	95.85
Row store	any	1645	12.58	2.71	98.56
Code	any	6	1.79	0.38	98.94
Stack	any	6	0.46	0.10	99.04

So the second big area behind the main data inside the CS is heap memory with about 200GB (~42% of the used memory). That is a pretty big part, isn’t it? But what is behind it? Why HANA need the heap? Ok, let’s go deeper:

SELECT 
Service_name, EFFECTIVE_ALLOCATION_LIMIT, 
TOTAL_MEMORY_USED_SIZE, Code_Size,Stack_size, 
HEAP_MEMORY_ALLOCATED_SIZE, HEAP_MEMORY_USED_SIZE 
FROM M_SERVICE_MEMORY 
where Service_name='indexserver'

SERVICE_NAME	EFFECTIVE_ ALLOCATION_LIMIT	TOTAL_MEMORY_ USED_SIZE	CODE_SIZE	STACK_SIZE	HEAP_MEMORY_ ALLOCATED_SIZE	HEAP_MEMORY_ USED_SIZE
indexserver	658.880.535.373	486.267.281.081	1.907.929.088	227.573.760	632.883.404.800	472.412.924.633

This statement shows the values of col store + heap area as heap memory. If you talk about heap you really mean CS + page cache + Intermediate results + MVCC + Delta Merge areas. With the normal memory overview statement you are not able to determine which area belongs together besides you read this blog or study a lot of notes and guides 😉

The area to analyse are the 192GB. To go deeper we need another statement.

You can check the usage of each area with SQL “HANA_Memory_TopConsumers_1.00.85” (statement adjustment: search for the term “modification section” and adjust ‘HEAP’ AREA)

HOST	PORT	AREA	DETAIL	NUM	SIZE_GB	SIZE_PCT	CUM_SIZE_PCT
any	any	HEAP	Pool/PersistenceManager/PersistentSpace/DefaultLPA/Page	3	146.06	31.49	31.49
any	any	HEAP	Pool/PersistenceManager/UnifiedTableContainer	1	9.23	1.99	33.48
any	any	HEAP	Pool/Statistics	6	7.20	1.55	35.03
any	any	HEAP	Pool/RowEngine/SQLPlan	6	4.12	0.88	35.91
any	any	HEAP	AllocateOnlyAllocator-unlimited/FLA-UL<3145728,1>/MemoryMapLevel2Blocks	6	3.65	0.78	36.69

The most parts of the heap have a good reason to be allocated, but there is also a area which called “Pool/PersistenceManager/PersistentSpace/DefaultLPA/Page”
This one is called the SAP HANA page cache. It is in this example the biggest part with about 150GB of 192GB.
It works similar to a file system cache of an unix system. Data which are retrieved from disk will be stored in this area. When this area will be shrinked is a decision of the system itself. It can take a long time and till this happens the allocated memory will be counted as “used memory”.
But this memory will be reused in case if the memory is needed for other objects, such as table data or query intermediate results.
This speeds up the work in some cases, but due to a bug the size of this cache can be unnecessary large with Revisions 110 to 122.04.
There is a workaround:
2301382 – High “Used memory” in Pool/PersistenceManager/PersistentSpace/DefaultLPA/Page after upgrade to HANA SPS11 or a higher SPS

Rev. 110 – 122.01: regular “resman shrink” scheduling
=> I don’t recommend this one because some minutes (depends on the workload) later the allocation is high again
Rev. 122.02 – 122.04: unload_upper_bound configuration was introduced
=> after the limit is hit an automatically shrink will be triggered

! Both are only workarounds !
=> it can have incluence of your performance because shrinking the resource container can potentially evict objects other than virtual file pages from memory, for example, table data or query intermediate results
=> It can lead to column store table unloads

A working solution was released in Rev 122.05.

To check out the different areas you can use hdbcons

> pageaccess a

### DynamicPageAccess ###
 PageType                           SizeCls      Disposition       hasRefs Count               MemorySize          ModifiedCount       ModifiedDiskSize
 ConvIdxPage                        256k         Temporary         yes     1                   524984              1                   262144
 ConvLeafPage                       256k         Temporary         yes     220                 65484320            83                  21757952
 FileIDMappingPage                  256k         Temporary         yes     175                 45997000            0                   0
 FileIDMappingPage                  256k         Shortterm         yes     141                 37060440            1                   262144
 ContainerDirectoryPage             256k         Longterm          yes     1204                316459360           15                  3932160
 ContainerNameDirectoryPage         256k         Longterm          no      7                   1839880             0                   0
 UndoFilePage                       64k          Shortterm         yes     489                 32387448            92                  6029312
 VirtualFilePage                    4k           InternalShortterm no      28685               137458520           84                  344064
 VirtualFilePage                    16k          InternalShortterm no      25911               442559880           81                  1327104
 VirtualFilePage                    64k          InternalShortterm no      29514               1954771248          81                  5308416
 VirtualFilePage                    256k         InternalShortterm no      20549               5401099160          52                  13631488
 VirtualFilePage                    1M           InternalShortterm no      13979               14667773288         12                  12582912
 VirtualFilePage                    4M           InternalShortterm no      6546                27460470000         0                   0
 VirtualFilePage                    16M          InternalShortterm no      5762                96674328944         0                   0
 VirtualFileLOBPage                 4k           Shortterm         no      106524              510463008           0                   0
 VirtualFileLOBPage                 16k          Shortterm         no      12473               213038840           0                   0
 VirtualFileLOBPage                 64k          Shortterm         no      1462                96831184            0                   0
 VirtualFileLOBPage                 256k         Shortterm         no      179                 47048360            0                   0
 VirtualFileLOBPage                 1M           Shortterm         no      9                   9443448             0                   0
 VirtualFileLOBPage                 4M           Shortterm         no      1                   4195000             0                   0
 TableContainerPage                 4k           Longterm          no      509                 2439128             0                   0
 TableContainerPage                 4k           Longterm          yes     126540              606379680           2                   8192
 TableContainerPage                 4k           NonSwappable      no      119                 570248              0                   0
 TableContainerPage                 4k           NonSwappable      yes     12819               61428648            100                 409600
 UnifiedTableDelta                  4k           Shortterm         no      295                 1413640             0                   0
 UnifiedTableDelta                  4k           Shortterm         yes     615                 2947080             14                  57344
 UnifiedTableDelta                  16k          Shortterm         no      123                 2100840             0                   0
 UnifiedTableDelta                  16k          Shortterm         yes     65                  1110200             6                   98304
 UnifiedTableDelta                  64k          Shortterm         no      180                 11921760            0                   0
 UnifiedTableDelta                  64k          Shortterm         yes     43                  2847976             3                   196608
 UnifiedTableDelta                  256k         Shortterm         no      584                 153498560           0                   0
 UnifiedTableDelta                  256k         Shortterm         yes     90                  23655600            0                   0
 UnifiedTableDictionary             4k           Shortterm         no      67                  321064              0                   0
 UnifiedTableDictionary             4k           Shortterm         yes     7519                36031048            8                   32768
 UnifiedTableDictionary             16k          Shortterm         yes     174                 2971920             1                   16384
 UnifiedTableDictionary             64k          Shortterm         yes     32                  2119424             0                   0
 UnifiedTableDictionary             256k         Temporary         yes     212                 55722080            12                  3145728
 UnifiedTableDictionary             256k         Shortterm         yes     382                 100404880           8                   2097152
 UnifiedTableDictionary             1M           Shortterm         yes     1                   1049272             0                   0
 UnifiedTableDictionary             4M           Shortterm         yes     1                   4195000             0                   0
 UnifiedTableMVCC                   256k         Shortterm         yes     30492               8014517280          24                  6291456
 total count                  = 434693
 total referenced count       = 181215
 total modified count         = 680
 total memory size            = 146.4GB
 total referenced memory size = 8977.2MB
 total modified disk size     = 74.1MB

Here we can see that the biggest part was spent by the different block sizes of VirtualFilePage. This feature was introduced with SPS11 and higher. Some specific types of persistency pages (virtual file pages) are more likely to be added to the HANA page cache to improve performance.

You can see that the VirtualFilePages are kept with disposition “InternalShortterm” and VirtualFileLOBPage with “Shortterm” which is a kind of priority.
The mechanism that evicts objects from memory when needed will consider objects with the disposition “InternalShortterm” with higher priority than other objects, such as table data and query intermediate results. This eviction happens automatically before any out-of-memory (OOM) situation.
So the new caching behaviour will not lead to OOM situations.

As you can see this new feature which can lead to an increased “used memory” is not an issue, but it is not transparent if the sizing is wrong and there is really an issue, because the alerting also reacts to the threshold of 80% (default) of a service. In the overview of the HANA Administrator or the DBACOCKPIT you will see that the memory consumption is pretty high but not why.
It also can lead to a licensing issue, because this depends on the peak memory usage.

Can there be fragmentation in the heap memory? Yes of course, but normally HANA itself takes care with the garbage collection. You can check it with command: