Memory and CPU issue with Nilaway on Kubebuilder projects

[hoptical]

I'm having trouble using Nilaway to detect nil pointers in the S3 Operator project. My OS hangs due to high memory and CPU usage. They are totally utilized by Nilaway. What is wrong?

System specification running Nilaway:
RAM: 16GB
CPU: Intel® Core™ i7-10510U CPU @ 1.80GHz × 8
OS: Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

Run commands leading to the crash:

go install go.uber.org/nilaway/cmd/nilaway@latest
nilaway ./...

[painhardcore]

I'm getting a huge swap file in the end. But yeah, cpu and ram consumption is a problem

[yuxincs]

Hi! NilAway by default analyzes everything (meaning all 3rd party dependencies and standard libraries), and the linter driver from go/analysis stores everything in memory.

If you specify only the first party packages for NilAway analysis (meaning we will apply optimistic defaults for packages not analyzed) by giving -include-pkgs flags (see https://github.com/uber-go/nilaway/wiki/Configuration#include-pkgs for details), the memory consumption should be significantly lower (assuming your Go project isn't 10M LOC of course).

(We are thinking of making it default to only analyze first party packages, or at least make it more explicit in our README, so I'm keeping this issue open for such efforts)

[hoptical]

@painhardcore @yuxincs Thanks for the following up.
@yuxincs I just used -include-pkgs to include only the first-party code and it got solved.

We had faced a nil pointer error in this line of the project in the runtime. I checked it out with Nilaway with this command since I knew it's caused by the subreconciler package:

nilaway -include-pkgs github.com/snapp-incubator/s3-operator,github.com/opdev/subreconciler ./...

However, Nilaway didn't recognize this part as a nil pointer and dangerous part of the code. I just wanted to mention it and you might find it helpful for further contributions to the package.

Thanks in advance.

[yuxincs]

@hoptical This is an interesting case, would you mind opening a new issue to elaborate it further?

I briefly took a look at the package but lost track of the call chain to see where the root cause is. We would be interested to investigate why NilAway fails to detect such false negatives.

[hoptical]

@yuxincs Thanks. Sure. I submitted the issue in #159.