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 :)

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.

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.

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]

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]

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]