OLS: On how user space sucks

OLS: On how user space sucks

Posted Jul 24, 2006 23:18 UTC (Mon) by bluefoxicy (guest, #25366)
Parent article: OLS: On how user space sucks

You know all you people are gathering nice profiling data and all, I'd like to know all the stuff that normally gets scanned for and why it's relevant. Seems to me the lot of you are running strace and finding a djillion gettimeofday()s et al; wouldn't it be nice to have a small shell script that does this and spits out timing information?

Unfortunately oprofile tends to suck and eat up gigs of hard disk space in a few days, else it'd be interesting to have a method of automatic profiling and reporting. Of course we then sacrifice cycles to do runtime profiling, which is no good in a production environment; but I'd volunteer some CPU time to gather data like that, it's not that much of a drag for light usage like typical desktop stuff. I'm not sure of the security implications here ... runtime timing data may be useful for getting parts of passwords or encryption keys, if it's detailed enough; but that's black magic to me so far.

---

(Log in to post comments)