Prologue (2006) I attended my first WWDC in 2006 to participate in Apple’s launch of their DTrace port to the next version of Mac OS X (Leopard). Apple completed all but the fiddliest finishing touches without help from the DTrace team. Even when they did meet with us we had no idea that they were mere [...]
I wanted to trace the system calls made by the find command to debug some performance issues however I could not figure out how to do this on Mac OS X Yosemite. How can I trace system calls for an arbitrary program similarly to what strace does on FreeBSD? I am especially interested in tracing file-system related calls. Mac App Store is the simplest way to find and download apps for your Mac. To download apps from the Mac App Store, you need a Mac with OS X 10.6.6 or later.
In: Apple, Mac OS X, ZFS
This is my example USE Method-based performance checklist for the Apple Mac OS X operating system, for identifying common bottlenecks and errors. This draws upon both command line and graphical tools for coverage, focusing where possible on those that are provided with the OS by default, or by Apple (eg, Instruments). Further notes about tools [...]
In: DTrace, Mac OS X, macosx, performance, usemethod
I wish that none of our customers encountered problems with our product, but they do, and when they do our means for remotely accessing their systems is often via a Webex shared screen. We remotely control their Delphix server to collect data (often using DTrace). While investigating a customer issue recently I developed a couple [...]
In: Delphix, Mac OS X, Webex
I originally posted this at http://bdgregg.blogspot.com/2008/02/dtracetoolkit-in-macos-x.html.
Apple included DTrace in MacOS X 10.5 (Leopard), released in October 2007. It's great to have DTrace available in MacOS X for its powerful application and kernel performance analysis. To think that there is now another kernel we can examine using DTrace is exciting – it's like discovering a new planet in the solar system.
Apart from kernel analysis, DTrace also improves general usability by answering every day questions like: why are my disks rattling? or why does my browser keep hanging? Although, your average user may not write DTrace scripts to answer these questions themselves (it's better if they do), but instead use prewritten scripts.
MacOS X includes a collection of DTrace scripts in /usr/bin, mostly from the DTraceToolkit:
That's 44 DTraceToolkit scripts, plus plockstat from Solaris 10. While the DTraceToolkit now has over 200 scripts, it makes sense to pick out the most useful scripts for inclusion in /usr/bin.
Popular scripts such as iosnoop can now be run by MacOS X users:
The man pages are conveniently included in /usr/share/man.
Dirt Race Mac Os Download
I had been making preperations in the latest DTraceToolkit (0.99) for MacOS X DTrace, such as putting an 'OS' field into the man pages and figuring out how to support different versions of the same script (tcpsnoop_snv, etc). Hopefully many scripts will run on both Solaris and MacOS X (especially if they use stable providers), however, I expect there will be some that are specific to each. Now that QNX DTrace also exists, there is additional need for identifying OS specifics in the DTraceToolkit.
Dirt Race Mac Os Update
It's been great news for DTrace, Sun, and Apple. Apple have not only gained the best performance and debugging tool available, but also the existing DTrace community.