[BBLISA-announce] Recap bblisa July talk

[John P. Rouillard]

Hi all:

Sorry for the delay.  I just realized that this never went out.

We had a quite spirited discussion of dtrace's capabilities and a good
crowd of 19 people.

As Jim Mauro stated DTrace fills the observability gap. My database is
slow, my cpu is 100% used for 3 minutes once a day. WHY?  It used to
be that stopping the system and dumping a kernel crash dump was the
way to debug these sorts of issues. However this is obviously a
horrible way to do it. In addition to providing insight to Solaris,
dtrace is available for OS X and FreeBSD.

Jim started with an overview of what dtrace can do and a demonstration
of how it does it magic. Also he discussed some of the design
decisions underlying dtrace that mitigate the potential problems of
dynamically adding and removing instrumentation from the kernel.

After this he proceeded to show a number of examples that could be used
to troubleshoot performance problems of a number of issues sysadmins
see on a regular basis.

We hope to have him back for a followup sometime next year, so if you
missed him this time you will get another chance.

He has generously made his slides available and we have put them at:

  http://www.bblisa.org/slides/201207_mauro_dtrace.pdf

See all of you in September.

--
				-- rouilj
John Rouillard
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My employers don't acknowledge my existence much less my opinions.