Category Archives: DTrace

Where Does Your Node Program Spend Its Time?

January 6, 2012 – 11:29 am

Originally posted at Dave Pacheco’s Blog. Performance analysis is one of the most difficult challenges in building production software. If a slow application isn’t spending much time on CPU, it could be waiting on filesystem (disk) I/O, network traffic, garbage collection, or many other things. We built the Cloud Analytics tool to help administrators and [...]

By Dave Pacheco | Also posted in Analytics, For Developers, For Sys Admins and Dev Ops, node.js | Leave a Comment

A 2000x Performance Win with DTrace Analytics

December 12, 2011 – 12:55 pm

Note: This post originally appeared on the DTrace blog of @brendangregg I recently helped analyze a performance issue in an unexpected but common place, where the fix improved performance of a task by around 2000x (two thousand times faster). As this is short, interesting and useful, I’ve reproduced it here in a lab environment to [...]

By alexsalkever | Also posted in Analytics, For Developers, For Sys Admins and Dev Ops, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

Drilling Down Into the Kernel

December 2, 2011 – 1:15 pm

Part 4 of 5 on Examining File System Latency in Production, by Brendan Gregg, Lead Performance Engineer at Joyent and author with Jim Mauro of “DTrace: Dynamic Tracing in Oracle Solaris, Mac OS X and FreeBSD” Previously I showed how to trace file system latency from within MySQL using the pid provider. Here I’ll show how [...]

By Deirdré Straughan | Also posted in Analytics, For Developers, For Sys Admins and Dev Ops, SmartOS | Comments (4)

Measuring File System Latency from Applications

November 30, 2011 – 8:50 am

Part 3 of 5 on Examining File System Latency in Production, by Brendan Gregg, Lead Performance Engineer at Joyent and author with Jim Mauro of “DTrace: Dynamic Tracing in Oracle Solaris, Mac OS X and FreeBSD” Here I’ll show how you can measure file system I/O latency – the time spent waiting for the file [...]

By Deirdré Straughan | Also posted in SmartOS | Comments (5)

Invisible Issues of I/O

November 14, 2011 – 3:00 pm

Part 2 of 5 on Examining File System Latency in Production, by Brendan Gregg, Lead Performance Engineer at Joyent and author with Jim Mauro of “DTrace: Dynamic Tracing in Oracle Solaris, Mac OS X and FreeBSD”  I previously explained why disk I/O is difficult to associate with an application, and why it can be altered from what the [...]

By Deirdré Straughan | Also posted in For Sys Admins and Dev Ops | Comments (5)

When iostat Leads You Astray

November 7, 2011 – 4:00 pm

Part 1 of 5 on Examining File System Latency in Production, by Brendan Gregg, Lead Performance Engineer at Joyent and author with Jim Mauro of “DTrace: Dynamic Tracing in Oracle Solaris, Mac OS X and FreeBSD”  When examining system performance problems, we commonly point the finger of blame at the system disks by observing disk I/O. This [...]

By Deirdré Straughan | Also posted in For Sys Admins and Dev Ops | Comments (4)

Case Study: Using Cloud Analytics to Troubleshoot A Node Knockout Winner

October 22, 2011 – 8:54 pm

On the weekend of August 27-29, Joyent hosted Node Knockout 2011, a 48-hour coding competition for node.js developers from around the world, working individually or in teams. (Note: This article was originally posted by Joyent’s Brendan Gregg on the DTrace.org blog.) The contest entries were all hosted on Joyent’s no.de platform, running on SmartDataCenter and SmartOS. The winning entry was Observer by Arnout Kazemeir, a [...]

By alexsalkever | Also posted in Analytics, For Joyent Cloud Customers, For Sys Admins and Dev Ops, Joyent, node.js, SmartOS, Tutorials, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

Why is my Mac slow? Top 10 DTrace Tune Up Tips for OS X

October 15, 2011 – 9:57 am

This post was originally written by Brendan Gregg, author with Jim Mauro of “DTrace: Dynamic Tracing in Oracle Solaris, Mac OS X and FreeBSD” and edited for Joyeur. As serious operating system geeks know by now, there are hidden gems in Mac OS X that deserve to be more widely used. Since version 10.5 (“Leopard”), [...]

By alexsalkever | Also posted in Analytics, For Developers, Joyent Cloud, Uncategorized | Comments (4)

Visualizing the Joyent Cloud with DTrace

October 5, 2011 – 11:19 am

(This is a repost of a blog put up this morning by Joyent’s Brendan Gregg over at the DTrace blog. It’s a very nice visualization of the Joyent Cloud using DTrace to map out our world.) Visualizing the Cloud I’ve worked on visualizations for a while, most recently with heatmaps for Joyent’s Cloud Analytics (here’s a link to a great introduction [...]

By alexsalkever | Also posted in Analytics, Infrastructure | Leave a Comment

Events: OSCON, Office Hours

July 26, 2011 – 2:07 pm

The annual OSCON convention put on by O’Reilly is underway in Portland, Oregon this week. Brendan Gregg and Dave Pacheco led the DTrace Community Birds of a Feather session yesterday, and today, Tuesday, is officially Node Day with Joyeurs Tom Hughes-Croucher and Ryan Dahl joined by friends from around the Node.js community to discuss the [...]

By Jackson West | Also posted in Events, node.js, Open Source | Leave a Comment
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 42 other followers