DTrace¶
DTrace exists to help you figure out how the system works and why the system is sluggish or acting in an unexpected manner. The name is short for Dynamic Tracing: a powerful idea pioneered by DTrace. Dynamic tracing allows one to peer into all parts of the system -- kernel, device drivers, libraries, services, web servers, applications, databases -- without any restarts, recompilations,or overhead. DTrace is a powerful tool in any programmer's toolkit, and has been included by default with various operating systems including Illumos, Solaris, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, and QNX. A Linux port is in development.
DTrace works by dynamically patching live running instructions with instrumentation code. The DTrace facility also supports Static Tracing: where user-friendly trace points are added to code and compiled-in before deployment.
DTrace provides a language, 'D', for writing DTrace scripts and one-liners. The language is like C and awk, and provides powerful ways to filter and summarize data in-kernel before passing to user-land. This is an important feature that enables DTrace to be used in performance-sensitive production environments, as it can greatly reduce the overhead of gathering and presenting data. ...more
DTrace for Beginners¶
- Tutorial: DTrace by Example
- Using DTrace to Analyze Your Webstack (short video)
- Top 10 DTrace scripts for Mac OS X
- Introducción a DTrace (in Spanish)
More DTrace¶
- DTrace FAQs
- Advanced DTrace Tips, Tricks and Gotchas
- DTrace: printf debugging for seventh-level wizards
Books¶
- DTrace Guide - now ported and updated for illumos!
- The Original Dynamic Tracing Guide available as a 408 page PDF (2008)
- Solaris Performance and Tools: takes Solaris perf analysis further with DTrace, 440 pages (2006)
- DTrace: the DTrace book of scripts and strategy, 1100 pages (2011).
Videos on DTrace¶
- Bryan Cantrill's Google Tech Talk
- Breaking Down MySQL/Percona Query Latency With DTrace
- Little Shop of Performance Horrors
- DTrace BoF at LISA10
- Brendan Gregg on DTrace at Kernel Conference Australia, 2009
- How to Build Better Applications with Oracle Solaris DTrace
- Observing Your App and Everything Else it Runs on Using DTrace
- DTracing Your Website
- The Problems Solaris Solves: Diagnosing Live Systems with DTrace
- DTrace, Goals, Successes, Failures, and Solving Problems - [Adam Leventhal][al]
- Building a monitoring framework using DTrace and MongoDB - [DanKimmel][dk]
- Debugging with DTrace - [Max Bruning][mb] - Training Director, Joyent
- Solving Problems with DTrace on any Platform - [Brendan Gregg][bg]
[al]: http://www.linkedin.com/in/adamleventhal [dk]: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/dan-kimmel/4a/88a/425 [mb]: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/max-bruning/0/337/180 [bg]: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/brendan-gregg/1/3a8/3/
dtrace.conf 2012 Videos¶
For a good overview and wrap-up, see Adam's blog post on dtrace.conf.
| Title | Speaker |
|---|---|
| State of the Union - video | Bryan Cantrill |
| Setting the Agenda - video | |
| User-Level CTF - video | Adam Leventhal |
| Dynamic Translators - video | Dave Pacheco |
| Control flow & language enhancements - video | Eric Schrock |
| Carousel ride! | |
| Clang Parser for DTrace - video | John Thompson |
| Visualizations - video | Brendan Gregg |
| Visualizations, Enabling toolchain for seamless USDT - video | Theo Schlossnagle |
| Visualizations - video | Richard Elling |
| DTrace in node.js - video | Mark Cavage |
| User-land probes for Erlang virtual machine - video | Scott Lystig Fritchie |
| DTrace on Linux - video | Kris Van Hees |
| ZFS DTrace provider | Matt Ahrens |
| DTrace on FreeBSD - video | Ryan Stone |
| Barriers to Adoption - video | Jarod Jenson |