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

Alexander Nyberg
2004-08-20T13:35:05Z

On Fri, 2004-08-20 at 02:23, Florian Weimer wrote:
> * 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.

Why can't this be done be looking at the major faults a process causes?

Not very slick indeed, but it can be done.

I wrote a small silly /proc/pid/stat parser at
http://serkiaden.mine.nu/procextract.c

One could quite easily hack up a tool to monitor I/O per process or
does it need to be very more precise?