Comment by taliesinb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by taliesinb | Hacker News Reader

That's indeed a useful list. lsof alone covers a lot of ground!

Mac OS X has a pretty nice set of DTrace scripts built in: http://dtrace.org/blogs/brendan/2011/10/10/top-10-dtrace-scr...

The ones I use the most:

* iosnoop: see all disk I/O. especially useful to find disk-chatty/poll-y apps.

* execsnoop: see new processes being spawned.

* opensnoop: see file opens. especially useful for failed file opens that break an app.

* dtruss: see all system calls. get access to the entire OS interaction history of an process (or app).

* errinfo: trace failing system calls. where there is smoke...

* iotop -- who is using disk

There is just a crazy, crazy list of things available, built-in:

  man -k dtrace

Edit: wow HN formatting sucks so bad. I wish I could make that list more readable, but apparently I can't.

You'll take your low-overhead-and-proud design and you'll like it. (that said, your post is very readable)

Have a Unicode bullet point, on the house.

•

Those scripts and more for Linux (3.2 or newer) using perf_events/ftrace:

https://github.com/brendangregg/perf-tools

IMHO, dtruss output is rather useless because hardly any of the arguments are human-readable.

That's true, but for getting a timeline of what happened, it's just the right tool.

    - Four spaces at the start of a line makes 'preformat',
      useful for code or lists. 
      - You'll want to manually wrap long lines, though.

Two spaces are actually enough.

But I don't want my descriptions to look like code!

Ideal for this example would be a table where the first column is formatted as code, and the second column as text.

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