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Comment by joshbaptiste | Hacker News Reader

Dtrace alone will turn you from a developer to a Developer + Systems admin + practical OS engineer, you will understand how your stack is performing within various lower levels of the operating system and be able to tune the hell out of your stack from bottom up.

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Come on, 0.1% of the people need Dtrace...

But that doesn't mean it's only useful to 0.1% of people.

If it's more widely available, more developers will reach for it.

The more comfortable people are with tools like DTrace, the better they will be able to write and use software.

Everyone needs to know all of the things. Just because it's a pain to get now doesn't mean people wouldn't use it if it were there. Remember when monitor mode meant patching drivers and running a weirdo kernel? It's like that.

Two things here:

- If you use Dtrace to troubleshoot a problem it's way beyond your scope of knowledge as a web developer. Dtrace is too deep and very specific to certain problems that you will never see because your regular nginx + php works fine in all cases.

- Not everyone wants and should be good at everything.

Just be good at what your doing well, I'm not saying that one shouldn't be curious but Dtrace isn't "an excuse" to install *BSD as a web dev.

If you don't use DTrace to debug php, you're missing a lot: http://php.net/manual/en/features.dtrace.dtrace.php. Same for python and ruby and node.js. All these have DTrace support.

DTrace is not hard, it's essential; and it's significantly easier, than say, awk, which is another crucial tool.

Under OSX it seems that DTrace support is incomplete thanks to OSX' dtrace implementation [1]. [1] https://github.com/joyent/node/issues/3617

I think only Solaris has full support?

Its interesting to some of us: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.4/static/dynamic-trace.html

0.1% of people in the world? That seems a little high. 0.1% of people who describe themselves as *-dev? That seems really low. Also, how do you define "need"? Dtrace isn't just for tracing functions down to the kernel level, and I can imagine all sorts of things that a web dev would find useful in dtrace. Just google "ruby dtrace".

If you do any kind of programming or system administration, you need DTrace (or some lame Linux equivalent). It really pains me to see that people reject it because it's "too advanced" for them, or such nonsense. Dynamic tracing is the one technique that will enrich your life as an IT professional more than absolutely anything else ever did.

And DTrace in particular is really, really easy to use (the Linux alternatives, not so much).

Yeah that said, Dtrace on FreeBSD sucks. The DSL is hard and many ready-to-run scripts don't run at all.

Other than Dtrace... Tools like dtruss & co are not as clean as strace, that's the feeling I've got when I had to trace some calls.

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