nz

Similar experience here, except that I've solved similar issues (and far more complicated issues) with DTrace instead of strace. The range of information that DTrace can retrieve about a running application surpasses anything that strace can retrieve. DTrace can retrieve information on a systemic scale, whereas each strace instance operates on a single process. And the overhead is significantly lower with DTrace.

For many of the systems applications I design for Illumos, I've used DTrace probes as a way of logging very frequent events, on demand (to avoid frequent IO). All of the events that _must_ be logged for the application to function properly, are logged and fsync'd.

I think that in most systems dynamic tracing will eventually replace a significant portion of the logging functionality that people code into their applications.

Either way, if you think strace is sweet, give DTrace a spin.

Some helpful links:

[0] A video demostration of DTrace, by the creator of DTrace.

[0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6chLw2aodYQ

[1] A post I wrote, demonstrating DTrace. Similar posts can be found on the blog's dtrace-addict page.

[1] http://nickziv.wordpress.com/2011/04/08/adventures-of-a-dtra...

[2] A wiki that contains DTrace examples for various languages and system facilities. Some examples may be Illumos-centric.

[2] http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/DTrace_Topics

[3] DTrace's home. Contains blogs by the engineers behind DTrace.

[3] http://www.dtrace.org

UPDATE: Meant to reply to parent's parent.

Or one can just use a tiling WM like dwm, xMonad, or stumpwm.

It seems that Terminator fills the void where a user wants to have tiling terminals, but can't because Mac OS X, to the best of my knowledge, doesn't allow one to fiddle with the windowing system to the same extreme that X does.

In some respect, yes the Solaris system has fallen behind the likes of Linux and *BSD. Particularly in the availability of third party libraries and applications. In other areas (such as the kernel) Solaris is much more stable, reliable, and advanced. I build a new kernel every week or so from illumos-gate, and must say that the technologies in the kernel (ZFS, DTrace, kmdb, smf, zones, predictive self healing, process rights management) and some shipped in user-land by default (mdb, libumem, pfiles, coreadm, event ports, pmap) are cutting edge.

In the end it boils down to using the right tool/OS for the job :)