27 June, 2005

DExplorer

I've just uploaded dexplorer ver 0.75, and it's shaping up to be quite a useful tool.
It runs a series of DTrace scripts that monitor generic system activity, and saves the output in a .tar.gz file with a meaningful structure,

http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/dtrace/dexplorer
http://www.brendangregg.com/dtrace.html#DExplorer

The idea came from David Visser, Christopher Wells, and several other guys I met while in Melbourne, Australia last week. It's a great idea - it makes a lot of sense.

Here I've expanded a .tar.gz file created by dexplorer to demo the contents,
# find de_jupiter_200506272230 -type f
de_jupiter_200506272230/Cpu/interrupt_by_cpu
de_jupiter_200506272230/Cpu/interrupt_time
de_jupiter_200506272230/Cpu/dispqlen_by_cpu
de_jupiter_200506272230/Cpu/sdt_count
de_jupiter_200506272230/Disk/pgpgin_by_process
de_jupiter_200506272230/Disk/fileopen_count
de_jupiter_200506272230/Disk/sizedist_by_process
de_jupiter_200506272230/Mem/minf_by_process
de_jupiter_200506272230/Mem/vminfo_by_process
de_jupiter_200506272230/Net/mib_data
de_jupiter_200506272230/Net/tcpw_by_process
de_jupiter_200506272230/Proc/sample_process
de_jupiter_200506272230/Proc/syscall_by_process
de_jupiter_200506272230/Proc/syscall_count
de_jupiter_200506272230/Proc/readb_by_process
de_jupiter_200506272230/Proc/writeb_by_process
de_jupiter_200506272230/Proc/sysinfo_by_process
de_jupiter_200506272230/Proc/newprocess_count
de_jupiter_200506272230/Proc/signal_count
de_jupiter_200506272230/Proc/syscall_errors
de_jupiter_200506272230/Info/uname-a
de_jupiter_200506272230/Info/psrinfo-v
de_jupiter_200506272230/Info/prtconf
de_jupiter_200506272230/Info/df-k
de_jupiter_200506272230/Info/ifconfig-a
de_jupiter_200506272230/Info/ps-o
de_jupiter_200506272230/Info/uptime
de_jupiter_200506272230/log

Lots of goodies to pick over.

The names of the files should indicate their contents. Many of them contain quite generic data, the idea is that one dexplorer file should contain as many statistics as possible.

Check for updates. I'll also throw it in the DTraceToolkit.

26 June, 2005

Created This

G'Day,

Back in 1996 I created a personal website to host various stuff, including artwork I had created using Povray. It also contained a message board called "The Wall", inspired by message boards I had been using on BBSes. People thought it was a dumb idea, some even horrified with the audacity of a personal website. I deleted it. Times have changed - personal websites are now more acceptable, and message boards or "blogs" are commonplace. "The Wall" is back.

Recently I have been doing various tricks with code, especially DTrace and OpenSolaris, and a blog seems like a useful way to share them. You'll probably find postings on computer programming languages including C, Perl, shell scripting and DTrace, plus various other topics of interest - AI programming, photography, rocketry, engineering, particle physics, beer, gaming, etc.

I'll try to get to the point. I'll also try to spell correctly. :-)

Enjoy.

Brendan

[Sydney, Australia]