supportconfig hangs at PROC..

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Environment

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 Service Pack 3 (SLES 12 SP3)
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15

Situation

Supportconfig collecting data on large systems (tested with 16TB/96 cores) is taking a long time and appears to be hung while gathering data in PROC (processor data):

Gathering system information
  Data Directory:    /var/log/nts_linux-kvph_180717_1336

  Basic Server Health Check...                 Done
  RPM Database...                              Done
  Basic Environment...                         Done
  System Modules...                            Done
  Memory Details...                            Done
  Disk I/O...                                  Done
  B-tree File System...                        Done
  YaST Files...                                Done
  File System List...                          Skipped
  Auditing...                                  Done
  Crash Info...                                Done
  NTP...                                       Done
  PROC...

At this point it can appear to be stuck for a long time and taking up to 6 hours to complete.

Resolution

The supportutils update to supportutils-3.0-95.15.1 released July/2018 includes the patch to collect sched_domain data for one CPU only.

Please install the recommended update.

Testing it on a 16TB/768 CPUs system it takes about 11 minutes to collect the data.

However depending on the workload the time may increase.

SUSE will be investigating how to lower the runtime of supportconfig in such cases in the future.

As a workaround run supportconfig -o PROC to skip the proc.txt file.

To keep the workaround persistent, it is possible to create a /etc/supportconfig.conf file with the command

# supportconfig -C

and then edit /etc/supportconfig.conf and add the following option to this file:

OPTION_PROC=0

Both will disable the module that reads /proc/.

Cause

Most of the time is spent in /proc collecting /proc/sys/kernel/sched_domain/cpuXXX/* files.

On a system with lot of CPUs it is taking a long time to collect the data/files for each CPU.

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