Dtrace Review
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN regards it as a gem of a technical talk that tackles a fundamental debugging problem and shows a new technology solving it.
What it is
Bryan Cantrill's 2007 Google Tech Talk on DTrace, showing how dynamic tracing improves debugging of both development and live production systems. It includes a vivid war story about tracking down a problem on a Sun Ray server.
Recommended by 4 HN commenters across 4 different months, 2013 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec dmit · 2013-04 · on “Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?”
I'm partial to Bryan Cantrill's Dtrace talk since it tackles a fundamental problem in software engineering and shows how to solve it using a new technology. The talk is more than 5 years old now, but sadly still as relevant as ever. [this video]
Strong rec chubot · 2013-05 · on “Stripping kernel/uboot source to 10% for code reading”
Do you mean you prefer Linux over Windows? If so, then watch this talk: [this video] Now you will prefer Solaris/BSD to Linux :)
Strong rec mwcampbell · 2016-10 · on “Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?”
A few of Bryan Cantrill's talks have already been mentioned here, but this one about DTrace, from 2007, is a gem: [this video] I especially like the part in the middle where he tells the story of how a an awful GNOME applet was killing a Sun Ray server, and how he tracked down the culprit with DTrace.
Recommends qznc · 2013-05 · on “KTAP: A New Scripting Dynamic Tracing Tool For Linux”
I have no personal experience with either, but this dtrace guy does not like SystemTap: [this video] The whole presentation is a nice and impressive dtrace showcase.
Recommends mwcampbell · 2025-07 · on “Using Sun Ray thin clients in 2025”
For an extended, colorful telling of the experience outlined in that paper, check out Bryan's earliest recorded talk on DTrace, particularly the section starting at the timestamp in this link: [this video]
Cites mwcampbell · 2023-04 · on “Of Sun Ray laptops, MIPS and getting root on them”
Reading about Sun Ray reminds me of Bryan Cantrill's oldest online DTrace talk [1], particularly the story of how a GNOME 2 stock ticker applet overloaded a Sun Ray Server, and how Bryan used DTrace to find the culprit. [1]: [this video]
Cites bcantrill · 2026-05 · on “Setting up a Sun Ray server on OpenIndiana Hipster 2025.10”
This is so great to see. I (like many!) have fond memories of Sun Ray. For me (and I suspect for others) Sun Ray will always represent the best of Sun -- and (of course!) some of the company's unrealized potential. As an aside on Sun Ray, it played a very important (if incidental) role in the development of DTrace in that one of the first truly production systems we used DTrace on was a Sun Ray server inside of Sun that was in a huge amount of pain. (I described this in the DTrace USENIX paper[0], and also in my "Dtrace (sic) Review" talk at Google ca. 2007.[1]) [0] [LINK] [1] [this video]