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Sun Microsystems Operating Systems Software Unix

Solaris' Dtrace in Detail 212

Posted by CowboyNeal from the d-proof-is-in-d-pudding dept.
paulkoan writes "The Register has a further details about the new Dtrace systems utility bundled with Solaris 10, along with pictures of the authors, and user testimonials. It also highlights Suns vague assurances that this (if it lives up to the hype) amazing utility may or may not end up in the public domain."
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Solaris' Dtrace in Detail More

Solaris' Dtrace in Detail

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  • assurance of what ??? (Score:3, Funny)

    by mirko ( 198274 ) on Friday July 09, 2004 @07:07AM (#9650826) Journal
    It also highlights Suns vague assurances that this amazing utility may or may not end up in the public domain."

    so, we are assured of a and !a ???

    • Re:assurance of what ??? (Score:4, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 09, 2004 @07:20AM (#9650865)
      so, we are assured of a and !a ???

      No, we're assured of a or !a.

      Although knowing Sun, they're probably trying for a and !a and wondering why it won't work...

      • In english, or is generally used to specify one or the other, but not both. So, they where really saying 'a xor !a'. Granted, this still evaluates to true.
        And it still dodging around the issue. I do enjoy how project looking glass (cool but fairly useless) was used as an example of the trend of Sun to go open source. I guess, as people speculated, Sun decided to dig through their stuff, find something 'sorta cool' and throw it to the public saying 'see, we're trying.

    • a || !a = 1 (Score:3, Funny)

      by pjt33 ( 739471 )
      No, we're vaguely assured that [i]true[/i].

    • It also highlights Suns vague assurances that this amazing utility may or may not end up in the public domain." so, we are assured of a and !a ???

      No, we are _vaguely_ assured of a *or* !a. I thought Sun made it clear enough! ;)

    • so, we are assured of a and !a ???

      Sun has a long history of vacilating on whether and how to open their products. Hardware interfaces, SPARC-based hardware cloning, various software packages, and so on. Often this means half-opening, licensing and failing to renew, and so on.

      It seems to be different every time. But the common thread is that they never commit. (I think the closest they came is Open Office where at least we have a fork.)

      It was due to their refusal to open things sufficiently for me to

  • And what is DTrace? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 09, 2004 @07:08AM (#9650830)
    It looks like it's an allround system monitoring and administration tool. But how is it different/better than a well-sorted collection of individual tools, each doing one job as good as possible?

    • Re:And what is DTrace? (Score:5, Informative)

      by davecb ( 6526 ) * <davecb@spamcop.net> on Friday July 09, 2004 @07:11AM (#9650837) Homepage Journal
      It's a mechanism for adding trace calls to pretty-nearly-arbitrary locations.

      • So how about this wild ass attempt for an explanation:

        Is dtrace simply a way of inserting wrapped, more-instrumented system calls to replace the standard ones, on the fly, perhaps using the same concepts as dynamic loaded libraries?

        [I'm accustomed to memory debuggers that work by substituting their own heavily instrumented wrapper versions of malloc() for the vanilla ones.]

    • Re:And what is DTrace? (Score:5, Informative)

      by int19 ( 778341 ) on Friday July 09, 2004 @07:20AM (#9650869)
      It is much, much more than that. The problem I find with a "well-sorted collection of individual tools" in this case is the complexity/difficulty/impossibility to do what dtrace can do. Check out this usenet posting [google.com] for some examples.

      I've been using it for a little while, it's a very interesting tool.

      • Re:And what is DTrace? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by afidel ( 530433 ) on Friday July 09, 2004 @07:41AM (#9650967)
        VERY cool indeed. Seems better than any tool for any OS I've seen. The closest would be process explorer from sysinternals but the level of detail is nowhere near what dtrace provides. For instance one thing that I've never been able to figure out is how to backtrace a file lock to the owner process.
        • For instance one thing that I've never been able to figure out is how to backtrace a file lock to the owner process.

          man fuser

          Also, for the masochistic out there, it is possible to look at the pfiles output for every process and match inodes.

    • Re:And what is DTrace? (Score:5, Informative)

      by chegosaurus ( 98703 ) on Friday July 09, 2004 @07:47AM (#9650981) Homepage
      That's kind of like saying perl is an all round text processing tool, then asking why using perl is better than using cut, sort, and tr.

      You can do a lot with cut sort and tr. Often they're all you need, but perl lets you solve problems those three tools can't even address.

      I'd recommend grabbing a Solaris 10 beta and having a play with this thing. It's pretty amazing.
    • Reading the article would help you find out.
    • Sounds just like Shark for Mac OS X.
      If DTrace is better than Shark, it must be an awesome tool. Shark does everything this article describes and far, far more:

      http://developer.apple.com/tools/shark_optimize. ht ml

      The 4.0 version of Shark shown at WWDC was even better. In many cases, Shark can actually give you specific directions on how to optimize your code: both at the source and instruction level.
      • I'll be blunt: Shark and DTrace are two entirely different animals.

        Looking at that Apple blurb (and reports I heard from WWDC attendees), Shark is a performance tweaking tool - a profiler. If you had ever bought the heavy-duty Sun compilers, you'd have a functionally similar set of tools (collect, analyzer, and cc with various flags that generates annotated source). Admittedly not nearly as polished as Apple's tools (and not as cheap), but Shark is also several years newer - and having done exactly the

  • It's about time (;-)) (Score:5, Interesting)

    by davecb ( 6526 ) * <davecb@spamcop.net> on Friday July 09, 2004 @07:08AM (#9650831) Homepage Journal
    Dtrace is a lovely mechanism, and once it's out in production Solaris (and maybe Linux) I'm going to write a new TPS/response-time monitor using it.

    • Re:It's about time (;-)) (Score:5, Funny)

      by sql*kitten ( 1359 ) * on Friday July 09, 2004 @07:56AM (#9651038)
      going to write a new TPS/response-time monitor using it.

      Did you get the memo about the cover sheet?

  • terrrible article (Score:4, Insightful)

    by XMichael ( 563651 ) on Friday July 09, 2004 @07:09AM (#9650833) Homepage Journal
    This article seems like it was written by Sun. I bet it's one of them junket articles, Sun must be a major sponsor of theregister.co.uk or something...

    The article says what this D-Trace does, but yet, doesn't... Not to mention it's neither objective, review like, and even fails to mention alternatives or relative tools

    Definately one of the poorest software article's I've seen in a while

    Slashdot is making me bitter (-;
    Complete CCTV Security Cameras [completecctv.com]

    • Re:terrrible article (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Handyman ( 97520 ) * on Friday July 09, 2004 @07:56AM (#9651042) Homepage Journal
      Sun must be a major sponsor of theregister.co.uk or something...

      I must agree that the article is pretty positive about the whole thing. But a positive review is not necessarily a bought review. In fact, the article does contain an angle that is not likely to be sponsored by Sun: open sourcing it, and open sourcing solaris. They explicitly make fun of Sun's president, who is evading their questions about open sourcing DTrace. From the article:

      So there you have it. DTrace may or may not end up in the public domain. Glad that's settled.

    • Re:terrrible article (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The article says what this D-Trace does, but yet, doesn't..
      The article gives sample uses, but it isn't a howto. I don't usually go to the register for technical howto's, do you? The article does link to more info on how to use the utility.

      Not to mention it's neither objective,
      Nor is it wholy pro-sun, it jabs the rep for not directly saying whether or not it will be open sourced and repeatedly makes comments about the hype ("It slices, it dices, it spins, it whirls").

      and even fails to mention alterna
    • At least it doesn't say Dtrace was a scalable,, three-tier, object-oriented, java-driven solution engine...

    • I agree with this. The article was very uncritical and did not place the software in any context.

      IBM mainframe users have had this type of stuff since the early '80s. (The trace facilities SMF etc. were much earlier but the cool tools for analysing the output weren't really there util then).

      Also there are similar tracing facilities available on AIX, although the user interface is classic IBM (obscure and picky) syntax.

      This could be viewed as case of Sun playing catchup with its competitors, and, hyping u

    • No one ever said The Register can't be [theregister.co.uk] bought [theregister.co.uk]

  • indeed! (Score:3, Funny)

    by rylin ( 688457 ) on Friday July 09, 2004 @07:10AM (#9650835)
    Bingo!
    In fact, you can bet your life that it will or won't show up in public domain.
    Now this is what I call a nice and reputable company! At least they keep what they promise!

  • Very Useful (Score:2, Interesting)

    by trifakir ( 792534 )
    Sounds great and I am quite impatient to see how it works (take a mental note to increase the priority of the Solaris upgrade on one of my toy SPARCs). I can see a growing need for a non-obtrusive profiling tool. As a matter of fact I started writing something which may be similar to dtrace for Linux [llama.gs] and it is for a long time in my TODO to port it to Solaris and maybe IRIX.

  • other resource (Score:5, Informative)

    by SubtleNuance ( 184325 ) on Friday July 09, 2004 @07:14AM (#9650846) Journal
    An excellent article at sys admin mag [samag.com].

  • just to save you all some trouble (Score:5, Insightful)

    by chegosaurus ( 98703 ) on Friday July 09, 2004 @07:17AM (#9650854) Homepage
    No, linux does not already do this.

    Solaris users could not care less whether Sun ports it to linux or not.

    Sun are *not* evil because they don't immediately give away the source to a product which has taken them years and $$$s to develop and which gives them an edge in a competetive market.

    Some people just prefer Solaris. If you prefer linux, that's fine.

    • Linux is not Solaris. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ehack ( 115197 ) on Friday July 09, 2004 @08:22AM (#9651258) Journal
      I don't think Sun's open sourcing the thing will help Linux users much anyway, the kernel design is probably very different, with more evolved semantics. Which means Linux developers will hae to do the work themselves if they want their admins to have these facilites.

      Note that this is finally a tool to resolve finger-pointing *it's your app that's slow - no it's the kernel etc* . I guess IBM will find it advantageous to create a similar Linux tool for their systems, as they bill Linux as an application serving environment. So we should see it soon on our own boxen.

      The sad thing is this proves once again that closed source companies retain an edge at innovating.

      • The sad thing is this proves once again that closed source companies retain an edge at innovating.

        I think you're missing the point. It's competition that drives innovation. Sun are having a hard time keeping up with performance of their rivals in no small part due to the fact their cpu architecture is falling behind. In order to remain competitive they need to take advantage of every opportunity to squeeze more performance from their systems and apps. If that urgency didn't exist, would they have felt t

      • The sad thing is this proves once again that closed source companies retain an edge at innovating.

        I disagree. Dtrace is the next logical step in performance monitoring. It is ahead of previous tools like gprof, gcov, Vampir, etc, and as such it represents real inovation. But is is not a revolution.

        I can think of dozens of Open Source programs which have also taken the next logical step in some field, and are in my opinion just as innovative. These programs include Screen, Valgrind, Beagle and BitTorrent.

    • Re:just to save you all some trouble (Score:4, Informative)

      by dpb ( 27814 ) on Friday July 09, 2004 @09:58AM (#9652127)
      > No, linux does not already do this.

      Yes, it does (well, 85% of it at least), in the form of DProbes [ibm.com]. Dynamic Probes was ported by IBM from OS/2 to Linux way back in 2000, is distributed by SuSE and some parts are in 2.6 kernel out-of-box.

  • Dtrace slashdot (Score:3, Funny)

    by hhg ( 200613 ) on Friday July 09, 2004 @07:19AM (#9650864)
    I bet someone has to DTrace his slashdotted server real soon now..

  • i/o preformance tuning (Score:5, Informative)

    by xyote ( 598794 ) on Friday July 09, 2004 @07:28AM (#9650891)
    I've used stuff that gave you a realtime display of i/o perfmance stats and you could see when the hotpoints were happening. The problem was how to fix it. It's not like the old days when you had maybe 3 disks and you just moved a filesystem or database partition to another disk. Now you have huge amounts of raid storage with logical volume managers and your logical volumes (partitions) are all over the place. It's not so easy. You could see a hot spot and determine that it's caused by two logical volumes sharing a physical drive. Except when you move one to a different drive, you could create different hot spots and they could be much worse. Kind of like wack-a-mole except you're playing it while you're on call. Not fun.

    It's a hugely complicated problem and it doesn't have a simple solution except in the minds of markedroids.

    • Pardon my ignorance, but if you are able to monitor i/o (and hotspots), on a full system, wouldn't it be possible to estimate/simulate what would happen if you moved a logical volume to another physical disk?

      1) monitor for a period of time (1 day, one week, something typical that sees all normal usage patterns);
      2) analyze collected data;
      3) simulate moved (physical) data;
      4) goto 2

      Perhaps I'm missing something -- I realize this would be complex, but does not sound impossible.

      S

  • looking glass (Score:3, Interesting)

    by stripyd ( 614714 ) on Friday July 09, 2004 @07:32AM (#9650909)
    I'm not sure how much of an indicator the open sourcing of looking glass is for what Sun decide to do with dtrace. Looking Glass never seemed to be anything more than a nice piece of eye candy to showcase the java desktop (the real product they were flogging). dtrace on the other hand looks like being one of their biggest pieces of product differentiation for Solaris in years. We all know how finance departments like those transactions-per-second->cost-per-transaction figures in making procurement decisions...

    I suppose we'll have to wait and see...
    • Why don't you stop expecting Sun to release it and write a replacement for your_favourite_free_os? Free software doesn't exist because of scraps from the corporate table, but because people get off their arses and write good software.

  • Microsoft perfmon (Score:4, Interesting)

    by esarjeant ( 100503 ) on Friday July 09, 2004 @07:34AM (#9650920) Homepage
    Not to be the devils advocate, but Microsoft has offered excellent detailed profile management via perfmon for quite some time now. You can inspect disk IO per-processes, memory per-processes, page faults, etc. etc.

    It's a bit of a misnomer to characterize dtrace as the first application for doing this, although I will say it's among the first that I have seen that is scriptable (a huge advantage when troubleshooting problems remotely).

    • Re:Microsoft perfmon (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      DTrace does much, much more than what perfmon does. They aren't even close to the same level in terms of their capabilities. And I say this, while being Windows developer myself..
      • It's been a while since I adminned any Solaris boxes in anger, but there was stuff on them that was equivalent or better than perfmon, and this was back with 2.7 / 2.8 machines.

    • Re:Microsoft perfmon (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Zode ( 102995 ) on Friday July 09, 2004 @11:42AM (#9653405) Homepage
      are you kidding? DTrace lets you do this not just per process, but per instruction, across CPUs. Comparing DTrace to perfmon is like comparing a Ferrari to a tricycle.

  • Sun reminds me of H2G2 philosophers (Score:5, Funny)

    by arvindn ( 542080 ) on Friday July 09, 2004 @07:35AM (#9650925) Homepage Journal
    Sun's vacillation about open source reminds me of the philosophers in the Hitchhiker's guide.


    ``But who the devil are you?'' exclaimed an outraged Fook.

    ``We,'' said Majikthise, ``are Philosophers.''

    ``Though we may not be,'' said Vroomfondel waving a warning finger at the programmers.

    ``Yes we are,'' insisted Majikthise. ``We are quite definitely here as representatives of the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries and Other Thinking Persons, and we want this machine off, and we want it off now!''

    ``What's the problem?'' said Lunkwill.

    ``I'll tell you what the problem is mate,'' said Majikthise, ``demarcation, that's the problem!''

    ``We demand,'' yelled Vroomfondel, ``that demarcation may or may not be the problem!''

    ``You just let the machines get on with the adding up,'' warned Majikthise, ``and we'll take care of the eternal verities thank you very much. You want to check your legal position you do mate. Under law the Quest for Ultimate Truth is quite clearly the inalienable prerogative of your working thinkers. Any bloody machine goes and actually finds it and we're straight out of a job aren't we? I mean what's the use of our sitting up half the night arguing that there may or may not be a God if this machine only goes and gives us his bleeding phone number the next morning?''

    ``That's right!'' shouted Vroomfondel, ``we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!''

  • Interesting... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by starseeker ( 141897 ) on Friday July 09, 2004 @07:38AM (#9650947) Homepage
    They seem to have a lot of praise from users, not just market speak. And technical users yet.

    I'd be very, VERY surprised if Sun allows Dtrace into the open source world, at least not for a while. If Dtrace really is the supertool it seems to be, and is actually and massively UNIQUE, it represents a reason peole will move to Solaris and buy Sun's hardware to do it. Maybe the closest thing to a Unix killer app that has existed for a while.

    Now eventually (as in five years down the road) it will probably pay for Sun to open it up. If I were them, I'd milk it for all its worth on the "get people to move to Sun boxes" mantra, while the rest of the world trys (and probably fails) to duplicate the tool. Then, when Sun has gotten all the converts they are likely to, start making the tool even BETTER by opening it up and letting the world go to town on it. (GPL or something similar so Sun can incorporate back in the goodies.)

    Of course, that's just an off the cuff theory by someone who doesn't know.
    • I'd be very, VERY surprised if Sun allows Dtrace into the open source world, at least not for a while.

      Oddly enough, there doesn't seem to be a patent for DTrace.

    • Re:Interesting... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by gr8_phk ( 621180 ) on Friday July 09, 2004 @10:21AM (#9652342)
      "Maybe the closest thing to a Unix killer app that has existed for a while."

      Ya, sysadmins are always trying to optimize code in the core applications they bought from vendors. NOT.

      It's not useless, but the examples cited were from application developers optimizing their code.

      • I think you are focusing too narrowly on this. The impact COULD be on many fronts.
        First, as a sysadmin you could determine where your problems exist and provide proof to your internal cevelopment teams or to the vendor. I would find this priceless as most of us have been on the vendor seesaw before. Oracle blames SAP who Oracle and then both intimate it could really be the OS or Veritas...
        Second, app developers can use this tool to dramatically improve the performance of their apps. You don't think db v
    • Solaris already has tons of reasons to choose it over linux. Its only failing is that is has not completely adopted and integrated the gnu tools. Once they dump all of that old system V shit and replace with gnu, they will have a killer OS. Especially if they conform the layout as much as possible to the Linux standard.

  • Understanding and using Dtrace (Score:5, Informative)

    by ChrisRijk ( 1818 ) on Friday July 09, 2004 @07:39AM (#9650950)
    Dynamic Instrumentation of Production Systems [sun.com] - this paper was presented at Usenix, and describes how Dtrace is actually implemented.

    Dtrace user guide [sun.com].

    A collection of Dtrace scripts [tpg.com.au]
    • Yes, and from seeing the USENIX presentation I can understand why the article referred to Cantrill as "energetic". After his presentation, the next speaker even joked about having to live up to the high standard that had just been set. If USENIX gave a "best presentation" award I suspect that talk would have won hands down.

  • Kprobes and Dprobes (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 09, 2004 @07:41AM (#9650966)

    How does Dtrace for Solaris differ from Kprobes [ibm.com] and Dprobes [ibm.com] for Linux ??
  • Not sure what all the hype is about, DTrace sounds alot like HP's Measureware and PerfView. Bundling it with the OS for no addition cost, that sounds good to me.

  • Linux Kernel Instrumentation (Score:4, Informative)

    by DaGoodBoy ( 8080 ) on Friday July 09, 2004 @07:58AM (#9651062) Homepage
    The Kernel Instrumentation Process [sourceforge.net] has already started creating the foundation for a kind of dtrace functionality. The profiling mechanisms appear to echo some of what Sun has done to Solaris to enable this kind of process-less profiling. Hope someone is still pushing this along...

    DaGoodBoy
  • My head explodes when I read marketing speak, what does it do? what is it?

    (any answers along the lines of it DTRACES your OS etc will make me come to your mothers house and explode my head all over her prize dinnerware set)
    • it gives you access to all Solaris' performance counters, system call tracing, etc. and gives you a command interface where you write simple scripts that easily manipulate and present that data in a way which is useful to your performance tuning or debugging purposes.

      You could derive work-alike programs for top, sar, ps, etc. etc. using simple dtrace scripts.

      And a lot of the statistics would be normally nearly impossible to get without debugging the kernel or poking around in /dev/kmem.

      By putting it all
  • This already exists in the linux 2.6 kernel (I think it may be back ported to the 2.4 as well).

    Its called OProfile.

    While not identical to DTrace it lets you perform the same task.

    And another advantage of open source - if you do find a resource hog, you can go in and "make it right".

    Heck, for really silly bottlenecks you could fix it in hours/days rather than months.

    • Re:Exists already in Linux kernel (Score:5, Informative)

      by movement ( 205310 ) on Friday July 09, 2004 @08:40AM (#9651408) Homepage
      I wrote OProfile, and I currently use DTrace daily, and I can assure you that you are wrong when you claim they do the same thing.

      OProfile is useful for measuring system-wide resource consumers (for example, you can see what pieces of code are causing cache misses in the kernel when your apache process is in the kernel etc, or which user processes take up the most CPU time).

      DTrace can also do something similar (though it needs a little more work yet). But DTrace does a LOT more than this. Imagine a system-wide (kernel, binaries, libraries) 'strace', where you can trivially choose what to print out, and what parts to strace, and under what circumstances. DTrace does even more than that.

      OProfile can't tell you exactly why your system call is returning EINVAL. OProfile can't tell you why your application is causing cross-calls. OProfile can't tell you what processes are writing to what files, in real time. OProfile can't debug race conditions.

      OProfile is a profiler: it does its job and nothing more. DTrace is, essentially, an instrumentation suite; one of its abilities is to function as a simple profiler.

      You won't really get a notion of why DTrace is so useful until you try it.

  • Other tools that do this. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by welloy ( 603138 ) on Friday July 09, 2004 @08:30AM (#9651331)
    "For example, there is no tool anywhere that allows for arbitrary dynamic instrumentation of a production operating system kernel."

    actually that's not true. Kerninst [paradyn.org] does exactly that.

    Kerninst is a framework for dynamically splicing code into a running kernel, almost anywhere, anytime. Code can be removed and changed at will. Kerninst works on standard (unmodified) Solaris and Linux kernels, *no* kernel re-compilation is necessary.

    • Re:Other tools that do this. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Dug ( 9395 ) on Friday July 09, 2004 @10:07AM (#9652193)
      Check out the Dtrace Usenix [sun.com] paper "Dynamic Instrumentation of Production Systems".

      This paragraph is copied from the Related Work section.

      Kerninst is a dynamic instrumentation framework that is designed for use on commodity operating system kernels[13]. Kerninst achieves zero probe effect when disabled, and allows instrumentation of virtually any text in the kernel. However, Kerninst is highly aggressive in its instrumentation; users can erroneously induce a fatal error by accidentally instrumenting routines that are not actually safe to instrument.3 Kerninst allows for some coalesence of data, but data may not be aggregated based on arbitrary tuples. Kerninst has some predicate support, but it does not allow for arbitrary predicates and has no support for arbitrary actions.

  • Favorite quote (Score:5, Funny)

    by kill-hup ( 120930 ) on Friday July 09, 2004 @08:35AM (#9651375) Homepage
    DTrace's inventors say admins need "to have a good relationship with their brains" to use the software best.

    I'll have to start using that in my conversations about lusers. "I wouldn't call him stupid; let's just say he doesn't have a good relationship with his brain..." :)

  • Sun comming arround? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by argoff ( 142580 ) on Friday July 09, 2004 @08:44AM (#9651448)
    There's an old saying, "you are what you hold yourself accountable to".

    In that sense, Sun is no Microsoft. They are a hardware company that provides services, plain and simple. The only reason why they are cold to Linux is because it pits Sun servers directly against x86 commodity PC's - otherwise they are all for it.

    Once the dust settles on their bread and butter revenue stream, you can better believe that they will be open-source all the way. But right now they need to force some differentation with their hardware because in most cases they simply can't compete against an x86 farm in the server space. All the rest of the BS about new accomplishment is just propaganda, I would ignore it.

    • Apart from the fact that they sell x86 and Opteron hardware and would happily have you running Solaris x86, which has DTrace as well, or Linux, bought from Sun, on that server farm, with Sun's 24x7 support for the whole solution. That server farm's probably connecting to a Sparc Oracle database anyway, so you can get the whole lot from Sun.

      Find out about what DTrace is, can do and what it means before simply referring to it as 'BS'.
      • I read about dtrace in detail, it is quite cool. Of course they are releasing it, because that kind of tool is usefull far more often on high end high cost computers, but it is still cool. When I was refering to BS, I was refering to all the other propaganda coming from Sun. Like ....

        No .... they would not have you hapilly running Solaris X86 - they only hapially do that when it becomes obvious that they cant push a bunch of overpriced SPARC servers on you. I guess they figure it's better to have you a
  • I wonder if they have attempted to run Dtrace on Dtrace? Wouldn't that allow you to make Dtrace infinitely fast? Perhaps become its own energy source?

    I know I would pay big dollars, say like $28, for a box that ran infinitely fast.

    This could be the diet pill for software bloat that we've all been looking for.

    • For the record - I RTFA, and although I am not a dev, think I have a handle on what Dtrace does.

      Would this *not* be an antidote to code bloat? I am rather puzzled why my parent post was slapped with -1 troll. Is bloat dear to the moderator? *hint hint*

  • So lets say I wanted to make a dtrace function that could do something like monitor for a high amount of cross calls. Upon noticing such an occurance it will then gather information on it and create a nice breakdown for me in an easy to see interface.

    Or I guess I'm asking, how complex can these functions get? Would it be feasible to tie it in with other things so I could do my own interface to it? Sounds like fun if I can...

  • A competing tool for Linux (Score:3, Interesting)

    by catalina68 ( 795455 ) on Friday July 09, 2004 @01:52PM (#9654772)
    For example, there is no tool anywhere that allows for arbitrary dynamic instrumentation of a production operating system kernel.
    I guess these guys haven't heard about SpyKer from LynuxWorks. http://www.lynuxworks.com/products/spyker/spyker03 .php3

  • Code Review (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ansible ( 9585 ) on Friday July 09, 2004 @01:59PM (#9654860) Journal

    I was reading the examples of using DTrace to spot performance issues.

    It seems to be that most of them could have been caught with code reviews.

    Perhaps with tools like DTrace, you can spot performance issues more quickly. But I believe a good code inspection regime could catch these problems and more.

  • So how exactly does Dtrace benefit application optimization? I code simulation programs to model physical systems. The applications can be CPU or I/O intensive and I'd like to know if Dtrace will help me optimize my code more than it already is.

    Can it suggest areas of vectorization, loop unrolling, parallelization, etc?

    Does it primarily give you stats on usage of functions, disk I/O, etc?

    The numerical methods I use are probabilistic, making them very hard to debug sometimes.
    (Imagine a bug occurring only
  • I am begining to like professional unix more and Linux less.

    I am about to try out solarisx86 and my asus motherboard, nic, and video card all happened to be supported with Solaris 9 oddly enough.

    I am interested to give this thing a spin.

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