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Oh how fun it is to performance tune my data analyses

Yes, all tracing tools have overhead. It's the observer effect. Nowadays I'm better at warning about this than I have in the past.

My company has a performance engineering team, but I imagine smaller companies don't have any performance staff, or time to deal with understanding this. Hence the value in creating canned tools for others to use, provided their warnings are made clear.

"why is no one using ftrace already?"

I think you mean sysdig. All glory to the awesomeness and simplicity that is sysdig: http://www.sysdig.org/

sysdig is simple, and has some awesome features, but also lacks many capabilities (eg, kernel dynamic tracing) that we currently need ftrace or perf_events for.

Edit: I should add -- there are three examples in the original post that use ftrace. You can't currently do any of these with sysdig.

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