Chapter 11

Other Existing Tools

There are myriad existing software performance observation tools [Saive 2015]. In fact, web searches for software packages

Click here to view code image

  atrace, btrace, ctrace, ... ztrace

find thousands of hits on all 26 names. In this chapter, we will give an overview of a baker's dozen of commonly used Linux tools. For a deeper treatment, I highly recommend Brendan Gregg's excellent Systems Performance book [Gregg 2021].

11.1 Kinds of Observation Tools

We categorize observation tools by what they observe and how frequently. The three general categories are

  • Counters

  • Profiles

  • Traces

Counting tools simply count events such as disk accesses (reads plus writes), interrupts, correctable memory errors, L1 cache ...

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