This four-day course explores the DTrace facility. The pace and complexity of information is intended for system administrators who consider themselves advanced or expert in Unix operating systems, in particular the Solaris Operating System. The course first demonstrates the tasks and analytic power that DTrace provides. Students learn the structure of the DTrace facility, apply well-known DTrace providers and probes, and familiarize themselves with Solaris utilities that complement DTrace. Students use DTrace to examine system performance on several levels, including device driver loading, kernel operations and process behavior. Students will review changes in Java Virtual Machine instrumentation over the last few releases and investigate program code that runs through process-based interpreters such as JavaScript. Exercises in analysis and trouble-shooting are incorporated throughout. After a technical review of DTrace architecture, students learn how to account for DTrace overhead, size its capacity on a system, and contain the costs of probe effect.

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ILT

Experienced System Administrators

Ability to administer a UNIX Operating System, preferably the Solaris 10 Operating System

• Experience reading and writing scripts
• Understanding of performance management fundamentals

Understand the capabilities of DTrace

• Build DTrace scripts
• Trace programs
• Analyze System performance
• Effectively implement and use DTrace within the Enterprise

Module 1 - DTrace: A Review By Example

• Tracing I/O by Process and File
• Profiling A Process By Function
• Timing A Function Call
• Tracing A System Call

• Probe Definitions
• The One-Liner
• Spewing Records
• Indexing and Aggregation
• The Role of the Provider

• Formatting Output
• Filtering with Predicates
• Programming with Actions
• Tracking with Thread-Local Variables

• Basic Debugging
• Applying Program Directives
• Command-line options
• #pragma options
• Clause-Local Variables
• Subroutines
• Speculative Tracing

• DTrace and JVM 1.5.x (dvm Provider)
• DTrace and JVM 1.6.x (Hotspot Provider)
• DTrace and OpenJDK 7 (JSDT)

• The sdt Provider
• JavaScript
• Apache HTTP
• MySQL
• Ruby
• Python
• PHP

• Tracing Virtual Memory Operations
• Tracing Scheduling Operations
• Tracing Device Drivers Loading
• Tracing Lock Contention
• Anonymous Tracing
• Solaris Doors

• Review: Diagnostic Tools
• Review: The pid Provider
• Review: The syscall provider
• Speculative Tracing
• Simple Profiling Techniques

• Selected Case Studies

• Enabling Control Blocks (ECB)
• DTrace Intermediate Format (DIF)
• DTrace Object Format (DOF)
• Buffering

• DTrace Features by Release
• Determining Probe Reliability
• Writing Reliable Scripts
• Using Reliable Providers
• Understanding Translators

• Buffer Policies
• Using Cacheable Predicates
• Probe Abuse and Aggregation Pitfalls
• Tuning for DTrace
• Maximizing Intrusion: Destructive Actions