Re: A good OS centric discussion on performance

Hi,

Search for "dynamic instrumentation" or "dynamic binary instrumentation" with AIX, HP-UX or other OS keyword.

There are really lots of such tools available, developed mostly by HPC & academic people. Most of such products work by rewriting binary code in memory during load or runtime. This means that in order to have a stable, foolproof and high-performing dynamic instrumentation framework, you have to implement it from very bottom of your OS. DTrace is doing pretty well in this area, their instrumentation code is also in the kernel.

Many other instrumentation tools use ptrace() interface, which imposes some limitations, as not being able to launch a debugger on the process when running in instrumented mode. Some tools require spawning the process using instrumentation tool, some can attach to an already running process and instrument it on the fly.

However, with dynamic instrumentation tools (especially the non-kernel ones) we have to be very careful - a tool which can instrument "ls" perfectly, might crash when dealing with forking, IPC, shared memory etc...

Few other keywords not already mentioned in the article: linux trace toolkit (LTT), Dyninst, Pintool, valgrind, callgrind, kprobes

Tanel.

• Original Message ----- From: Allen, Brandon To: john.kanagaraj_at_hds.com ; oracle-l_at_freelists.org Sent: Tuesday, February 21, 2006 1:28 PM Subject: RE: A good OS centric discussion on performance

  Yep, good article. Is anyone aware of anything similar to Solaris' DTrace for HPUX or AIX?

  -----Original Message-----
  From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org [mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org]On Behalf Of John Kanagaraj   Sent: Tuesday, February 21, 2006 11:21 AM   To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
  Subject: A good OS centric discussion on performance

  Hi all,

  http://acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=363&page=1

  Came across this link (from a SQLServer newsletter of all places!) This is a very interesting Q & A from a "Cary" clone (if I may use this term!) in the UNIX/Linux/Java/C world. It is a bit long, but he does cover a lot of ground.

  Cheers,
  John Kanagaraj <><
  DB Soft Inc
  Phone: 408-970-7002 (W)

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