KHB: Dynamic Instrumentation of Production Systems (a.k.a. DTrace)

KHB: Dynamic Instrumentation of Production Systems (a.k.a. DTrace)

Posted Sep 14, 2006 22:13 UTC (Thu) by Tet (subscriber, #5433)
Parent article: KHB: Dynamic Instrumentation of Production Systems (a.k.a. DTrace)

SystemTap is a wonderful tool, and has come to my rescue several times. It pointed out, for example, than an idle Sun JVM plugin in my web browser was responsible for over 80% of all the system calls being made on my machine, and was significantly hampering performance.

At the moment, though, it's a pain in the arse to get working on a non-Fedora machine, in part due to the lack of documentation, and in part due to the plain missing source code[1]. I long for the day that I can get it up and running on a CentOS Xen instance on an amd64 machine. It would help me track down some performance issues we have with one of our production machines.

The sooner it's shipped as standard with mainstream distributions, the better, as far as I'm concerned.

[1] Although I think this has now been fixed. Certainly in the past, the necessary version of elfutils was missing from the listed download site, which made compiling SystemTap yourself somewhat tricky to say the least...

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