Re: DTrace-like analysis possible with future Linux kernels?

Florian Weimer
2004-08-20T00:23:25Z

* Julien Oster:

> Miles Lane <miles.lane@comcast.net> writes:
>
>> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/08/dtrace_user_take/:
>> "Sun sees DTrace as a big advantage for Solaris over other versions of Unix
>> and Linux."
>
> That article is way too hypey.

Maybe, but DTrace seems to solve one really pressing problem: tracking
disk I/O to the processes causing it. Unexplained high I/O
utilization is a *very* common problem, and there aren't any tools to
diagnose it.

Most other system resources can be tracked quite easily: disk space,
CPU time, committed address space, even network I/O (with tcpdump and
netstat -p). But there's no such thing for disk I/O.