Re: DTrace Probes?

On 6/17/05, Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> wrote:
> Hey, Folks,
>
> I need to find someone who's really interesed in working with DTrace. Sun
> has offered to help put DTrace probes into PostgreSQL for advanced
> profiling, but need to know where to probe. Anyone?
>
> I'm afraid that I won't get around to this quickly enough.

I played a little with DTrace probes when Solaris 10 just came
out. DTrace is useful when you have no source code of application
or when you are collecting statistics on a live system. Otherwise
it is not much different from gprof apart, maybe, that it can collect
statistics about kernel syscalls.

Anyways, DTrace is a very powerful yet lightweight tool. Creating a
strace program to attach to a running PostgreSQL instance and collect
statistics will be a nice thing to do. We may even find some bottlenecks
in our code. I can volunteer to do it but I do not have a through understanding
of PostgreSQL internals.

> --Josh
Regards,
Nicolai