Dtrace Review
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended as the DTrace creator's own demonstration and a reference for dynamic tracing.
What it is
A 2007 Google Tech Talk in which Bryan Cantrill demonstrates DTrace and explains how it improves debugging of both development and live production systems.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2011 to 2021.
What Hacker News said
Recommends nz · 2011-08 · on “Awesome but commonly unknown Linux Commands”
Similar experience here, except that I've solved similar issues (and far more complicated issues) with DTrace instead of strace. The range of information that DTrace can retrieve about a running application surpasses anything that strace can retrieve. DTrace can retrieve information on a systemic scale, whereas each strace instance operates on a single process. And the overhead is significantly lower with DTrace. For many of the systems applications I design for Illumos, I've used DTrace probes as a way of logging very frequent events, on demand (to avoid frequent IO). All of the events that _must_ be logged for the application to function properly, are logged and fsync'd. I think that in mo
Recommends gbrown_ · 2016-08 · on “DTrace and Python”
> Does anyone have any inside knowledge of when, if ever, DTrace might become a standard/official part of Linux? Never. Due to dtrace being licensed under the CDDL it will never be mainlined into the upstream kernel. I would be keen to point out this does not mean there is a conflict of licenses from a legal point of view. Before anyone starts making claims like "you're not allowed to do this", see the use of the ZFS kernel module in recent releases of Ubuntu. I shall say no more on the matter as a refuse to be drawn into a licensing debate... Getting back on topic, those seeking more on user space providers should check out this video from Bryan Cantrill. [this video] Full disclosure I never had
Cites kev009 · 2016-12 · on “"Solaris being canned, at least 50% of teams to be RIF'd in short term"”
That sounds very believable and would have slowed commercial SPARC users from switching to whitebox x86, likely intentionally, but would have had no relevance to startups and the rapid onslaught of hyperscalers. A video that amuses me with respect to engineering culture and organization blindness is Cantrill doing a DTrace demo at Google in 2007 [this video] . The audience seems completely unaware about the significance of what they are seeing. The length of time between Linux getting cogent tracing support is telling. GOOG could have single-handedly propped up an extra-Sun OpenSolaris community, and there would have been nice symbiosis considering their early container usage and how long that to
Cites throw0101a · 2021-01 · on “Software Is Drowning the World”
> Code, on the other hand, is a social constrution but entirely confined in an abstract and mathematical world. Brian Cantrill had a good observation in a 2007 Google TechTalk introducing Dtrace: > In software the blueprints are the machine. In software once you design the thing you've built it: the design is the machine. That's why the waterfall model is so fundamentally flawed. This idea that you could design the design before you design it, which is what the waterfall model is essentially saying, is flawed. Software is both, it's both information and machine. (@3m40s) * [this video] I originally ran across it on Google Video: * [LINK]