OLS: On how user space sucks

OLS: On how user space sucks

Posted Jul 21, 2006 17:40 UTC (Fri) by Tet (subscriber, #5433)
In reply to: OLS: On how user space sucks by nix
Parent article: OLS: On how user space sucks

What this is really telling us is that we need better docs, I think.

Well, yes. But also better tools. SystemTap is a perfect example of a "better tool" in this case. It lets you look at problems at a system-wide level, rather than on a per-process basis, and you'd be amazed at some of the things that show up, in places you're least expecting. It turns out that on my desktop, ioctl() and poll() are called more than any other system call, by an order of magnitude -- where intuitively (and based on experience on previous systems), I'd have expected gettimeofday(). SystemTap provides an easy way to track down the culprit, too (in this case, the java_vm, even when no applet is running -- but being closed source, there's sadly nothing that can be done to fix it).

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