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Q&A: Sun exec ponders OpenSolaris, Linux (ComputerWorld)
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Q&A: Sun exec ponders OpenSolaris, Linux (ComputerWorld)
Posted May 14, 2008 3:45 UTC (Wed) by afalko (subscriber, #37028) [Link]
One of the things Murdock is touting in OpenSolaris is Dtrace. He claims that webapps can be profiled using Dtrace. Does anyone know how that works? If I use Perl, will Dtrace tell me in which subroutines the most time is being spent? For C, is Dtrace any better than Oprofile?
Q&A: Sun exec ponders OpenSolaris, Linux (ComputerWorld)
Posted May 14, 2008 7:15 UTC (Wed) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link]
You can DTrace Perl apps, Python apps, PHP apps and more. You can DTrace databases. You can even DTrace JavaScript in Mozilla. So you can have all the information -- what user clicked, what webserver received, how SQL query was generated, how much time all those calls took, what parameters and return values were passed, what was served from cache... and so on. DTrace is great.
Q&A: Sun exec ponders OpenSolaris, Linux (ComputerWorld)
Posted May 15, 2008 15:13 UTC (Thu) by dmag (subscriber, #17775) [Link]
Yes, the actual source code of the JVM, Perl and Ruby interpreters have been annotated so that DTrace can easily find out what's going on at a high level. (I think MySQL too). Even for "normal" programs, DTrace can still trace any function in the symbol table. Some name mangling required for C++. http://developers.sun.com/solaris/articles/dtrace_cc.html It's pretty neat that it can work over the whole OS (kernel thru scripts thru apps). For example, you could get a list of the incoming TCP connection data vs your perl script subroutines vs database queries.
Q&A: Sun exec ponders OpenSolaris, Linux (ComputerWorld)
Posted May 15, 2008 15:23 UTC (Thu) by afalko (subscriber, #37028) [Link]
Wow, DTrace is amazing. Are the annotations something that can be contributed to the OSS community? There is no way an OSS equivalent can be made?
DTrace
Posted May 15, 2008 15:35 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]
See this article from last August.
Q&A: Sun exec ponders OpenSolaris, Linux (ComputerWorld)
Posted May 15, 2008 15:37 UTC (Thu) by dmag (subscriber, #17775) [Link]
Yes, the extra probes are already OSS. DTrace is already OSS (CDDL), as is the whole Solaris kernel, including ZFS. The OpenSolaris OS is mostly OSS, except for a few programs. Work is underway to eliminate that (for all I know, there could already be a distro that ships the CDDL kernel with a 100% OSS userland). http://www.opensolaris.org/os/downloads/ The packages available for OpenSolaris tend to be crufty (old, not much selection if you are into 'new' tools such as nginx or git.)