LinuxQuestions.org - Linux Performance Analysis: New Tools and Old Secrets

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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.

More at Brendan Gregg's Blog... (and the slides are on slideshare).

--jeremy