Visualizing Process Execution

dtrace.org

112 points·lnmx··11 comments

Graphviz is very useful for visualizing large graphs. You can learn to use it effectively in under five minutes. It's also very easy to transform CSV data into graphviz markup by piping it through one or two sed scripts.

Where can you learn to use it effectively in under five minutes?

Assuming you have dot installed:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOT_language

Also, these are useful:

http://www.graphviz.org/pdf/dotguide.pdf

http://linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/05/06/graphviz_do...

Thanks

Another good example is in the book Land of Lisp. Chapter 7 and 8 makes a game, Hunt the Wumpus, using Graphviz:

http://landoflisp.com/source.html (check out graph-util.lisp and wumpus.lisp)

Chapter 8 is even available as a free download:

http://nostarch.com/download/Lisp08.pdf

The visualizations of processes are crucial to my understanding of Brendan's analysis. As a visual person, I can't imagine using this data another way.

Once again we see that screen size remains a central UI limitation to better UX. Give me a wide printer and a big wall any time!

We're actually planning to print some of those at full size as office decoration.

You may be interested in this work: http://infovis.cs.vt.edu/gigapixel/

I've made something very similar, but using Ubigraph and for Python: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2kyssgtUvM

Looks very nice - I'd love to do something like this for Lua. I went looking for more details, but it looks like your blog is down, alas .. anyway, if there is already something out there on the subject of using Ubigraph, tutorial/howto-wise, I'll go looking for it. It'd be great to have something like that when debugging a large Lua project.

Really neat.

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