Linux Performance Analysis: New Tools and Old Secrets
Linux - NewsThis forum is for original Linux News. If you'd like to write content for LQ, feel free to contact us.
All threads in the forum need to be approved before they will appear.
Notices
Welcome to LinuxQuestions.org, a friendly and active Linux Community.
You are currently viewing LQ as a guest. By joining our community you will have the ability to post topics, receive our newsletter, use the advanced search, subscribe to threads and access many other special features. Registration is quick, simple and absolutely free. Join our community today!
Note that registered members see fewer ads, and ContentLink is completely disabled once you log in.
If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact us. If you need to reset your password, click here.
Having a problem logging in? Please visit this page to clear all LQ-related cookies.
Get a virtual cloud desktop with the Linux distro that you want in less than five minutes with Shells! With over 10 pre-installed distros to choose from, the worry-free installation life is here! Whether you are a digital nomad or just looking for flexibility, Shells can put your Linux machine on the device that you want to use.
Exclusive for LQ members, get up to 45% off per month. Click here for more info.
Distribution: Debian, Red Hat, Slackware, Fedora, Ubuntu
Posts: 13,604
Rep:
Linux Performance Analysis: New Tools and Old Secrets
Quote:
At the last USENIX/LISA conference, I gave a talk on new Linux performance tools: my open source perf-tools collection. These use existing kernel frameworks, ftrace and perf_events, which are built in to most Linux kernel distributions by default, including the Linux cloud instances I analyze at Netflix.
I have a long history of creating DTrace scripts, published in the DTraceToolkit and the DTrace book, some of which are shipped by default in some OSes. After switching to Linux, I've been looking for ways to port them over, and have found that ftrace and perf_events which are in the Linux kernel source can provide many of the capabilities I need. My perf-tools collection provides scripts to facilitate their use.
Ftrace, in particular, seems to be a well-kept secret of the Linux kernel. It was created by Steven Rostedt, and has had virtually no marketing. The tools I'm creating can help raise awareness, by showing examples of what ftrace can do.
The perf-tools collection contains several single-purpose tools, like iosnoop, which aim to do one thing and do it well (Unix philosophy).
While these tools have a polished interface (USAGE message, man page, examples file), their internals often make use of temporary hacks, awaiting more Linux kernel features. For example, iosnoop passes both I/O request and response timestamps to user-level, which then calculates the delta, when it would be more efficient to do this calculation in-kernel, and only pass the result.
LinuxQuestions.org is looking for people interested in writing
Editorials, Articles, Reviews, and more. If you'd like to contribute
content, let us know.