I previously described how to use strace to to summarize system call activity on Linux hosts. Solaris provides similar data with the truss “-c” option:
$ truss -c -p 26396
syscall seconds calls errors
read .000 3
write 7.671 25038
time .000 21
stat .000 15
lseek .460 24944
getpid .000 15
kill .162 7664
sigaction .004 237
writev .000 3
lwp_sigmask .897 49887
pollsys .476 7667
-------- ------ ----
sys totals: 9.674 115494 0
usr time: 2.250
elapsed: 180.940
The output contains the total elapsed time, a breakdown of user and system time, the number of errors that occurred, the number of times each system call was invoked and the total accrued time for each system call. This has numerous uses, and allows you to easily see how a process is intereacting with the kernel. Sweet!