DTrace Dynamic Tracing in Oracle Solaris, Mac OS X and FreeBSD

Brendan Gregg is a performance specialist at Joyent and is known worldwide in the field of DTrace. Brendan created and developed the DTraceToolkit and is the coauthor of Solaris^TM Performance and Tools (Prentice Hall, 2006) as well as numerous articles about DTrace. Many of Brendan's DTrace scripts are shipped by default in Mac OS X.

Jim Mauro is a senior software engineer for Oracle Corporation, working in the Systems group with a primary focus on systems performance. Jim has 30 years of experience in the computer industry and coauthored Solaris^TM Performance and Tools and the first and second editions of Solaris^TM Internals (Sun Microsystems Press, 2000, and Prentice Hall, 2006).

What Is DTrace? 1

Why Do You Need It? 1

Capabilities 2

Dynamic and Static Probes 4

DTrace Features 4

A First Look 6

Overview 8

Architecture 16

Summary 17

D Language Components 20

Probes 23

Variables 26

Aggregations 33

Actions 37

Options 43

Example Programs 44

Summary 49

Start at the Beginning 52

Observing CPUs 56

Observing Memory 95

Observing Disk and Network I/O 125

Summary 148

Capabilities 152

Disk I/O Strategy 154

Checklist 155

Providers 156

Scripts 172

Case Studies 269

Summary 290

Capabilities 292

Strategy 295

Checklist 296

Providers 297

Scripts 313

Case Study 387

Summary 397

Capabilities 400

Strategy 402

Checklist 403

Providers 404

Scripts 445

Common Mistakes 548

Summary 555

Capabilities 558

Strategy 558

Checklist 559

Providers 560

Scripts 574

Summary 668

Capabilities 671

Strategy 672

Checklist 674

Providers 675

C 679

C++ 689

Java 691

JavaScript 705

Perl 719

PHP 731

Python 740

Ruby 751

Shell 764

Tcl 774

Summary 782

Capabilities 784

Strategy 784

Checklist 786

Providers 787

Scripts 804

Case Studies 817

Summary 832

Capabilities 834

Strategy 835

Providers 836

MySQL 837

PostgreSQL 851

Oracle 858

Summary 865

Privileges, Detection, and Debugging 867

Scripts 875

Summary 892

Capabilities 894

Strategy 896

Checklist 897

Providers 897

Scripts 932

Summary 945

The DTraceToolkit 948

Chime 962

DTrace GUI Plug-in for NetBeans and Sun Studio 966

DLight, Oracle Solaris Studio 12.2 966

Mac OS X Instruments 971

Analytics 973

Summary 985

Tip 1: Known Workloads 987

Tip 2: Write Target Software 989

Tip 3: Use grep to Search for Probes 991

Tip 4: Frequency Count 991

Tip 5: Time Stamp Column, Postsort 992

Tip 6: Use Perl to Postprocess 993

Tip 7: Learn Syscalls 994

Tip 8: timestamp vs. vtimestamp 995

Tip 9: profile:::profile-997 and Profiling 996

Tip 10: Variable Scope and Use 997

Tip 11: strlen() and strcmp() 999

Tip 12: Check Assumptions 1000

Tip 13: Keep It Simple 1001

Tip 14: Consider Performance Impact 1001

Tip 15: drops and dynvardrops 1003

Tip 16: Tail-Call Optimization 1003

Further Reading 1003

Providers 1025

Arguments 1038

Enabling DTrace on FreeBSD 7.1 and 8.0 1045

DTrace for FreeBSD: John Birrell 1047

USDT Bourne Shell Provider 1052

Case Study: Implementing a Bourne Shell Provider 1057

Privileges 1063

Drops 1064

Aggregation Drops 1065

Dynamic Variable Drops 1066

Invalid Address 1066

Maximum Program Size 1067

Not Enough Space 1068

Synopsis 1069

Finding Probes 1069

Finding Probe Arguments 1070

Probes 1070

Vars 1070

Actions 1071

Switches 1071

Pragmas 1071

One-Liners 1072

Suggested Reading 1073

Vendor Manuals 1075

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