Dtrace Review

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. [VIDEO]

Do you mean you prefer Linux over Windows? If so, then watch this talk: [VIDEO] Now you will prefer Solaris/BSD to Linux :)

A few of Bryan Cantrill's talks have already been mentioned here, but this one about DTrace, from 2007, is a gem: [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.

I have no personal experience with either, but this dtrace guy does not like SystemTap: [VIDEO] The whole presentation is a nice and impressive dtrace showcase.

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: [VIDEO]

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]: [VIDEO]

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] [VIDEO]