Thread: DTrace Probes?

DTrace Probes?

From
Josh Berkus
Date:
Hey, Folks,

I need to find someone who's really interesed in working with DTrace.  Sun 
has offered to help put DTrace probes into PostgreSQL for advanced 
profiling, but need to know where to probe.   Anyone?

I'm afraid that I won't get around to this quickly enough.

-- 
--Josh

Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco


Re: DTrace Probes?

From
Nicolai Tufar
Date:
On 6/17/05, Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com> wrote:
> Hey, Folks,
>
> I need to find someone who's really interesed in working with DTrace.  Sun
> has offered to help put DTrace probes into PostgreSQL for advanced
> profiling, but need to know where to probe.   Anyone?
>
> I'm afraid that I won't get around to this quickly enough.

I played a little with DTrace probes when Solaris 10 just came
out. DTrace is useful when you have no source code of application
or when you are collecting statistics on a live system. Otherwise
it is not much different from gprof apart, maybe, that it can collect
statistics about kernel syscalls.

Anyways, DTrace is a very powerful yet lightweight tool. Creating a
strace program to attach to a running PostgreSQL instance and collect
statistics will be a nice thing to do. We may even find some bottlenecks
in our code. I can volunteer to do it but I do not have a through understanding
of PostgreSQL internals.

> --Josh
Regards,
Nicolai