(4260) Dtrace for Java Developers

Technical short talk 20 min

Thursday, 2008-06-26, 11:00 - 11:20, Arena 8

• Jason Brazile - Netcetera (speaker)
• Stefan Tramm - Netcetera (co-speaker)

Topics

• Profiling tools
• Real-world experiences and show cases

Abstract

Sun's dynamic tracing tool DTrace is now available on at least three different 
platforms: (Open) Solaris 10, MacOSX 10.5 (Leopard) and FreeBSD (7+). Although a 
large number of alternative tools exist for the analysis and profiling of Java 
programs, Dtrace offers unique advantages such as 1) availability in standard 
production systems 2) visibility throughout the entire application from java 
stack traces, through JVM primitives, C library calls, and finally operating 
system calls 3) relatively non-intrusive profiling - allowing observability 
without affecting behavior 4) the possibility of aggregate results as opposed to 
the visibility of single events and 5) scriptability for the ability to 
reproduce non-trivial investigations.

This short talk introduces the general capabilities of Dtrace, the specific 
features available to Java developers (especially starting with release 1.5), 
and describes a few important existing scripts that would be interesting Java 
developers. While it is possible and relatively easy to develop custom scripts, 
a wide variety of observations are possible using relatively few existing 
standard scripts.  Finally, specific patterns are described for drilling down 
into problems with the intention of showing the direction that custom scripts 
could help with for advanced users.