While I was analyzing the performance characteristics of one of my Solaris 9 Oracle database servers, I needed to map a file descriptor listed in the pfiles output to the actual file name on the file system (Solaris 10 provides this information in the pfiles output, which is yet another reason to run Solaris 10). [...]
I was recently asked to debug a performance problem with a message passing applications. Once I received an overview of how the application worked, I started digging through the system data. To see where the application was spending it’s time, I ran the following DTrace program: $ cat syscalltime.d #pragma D option quiet syscall:::entry / [...]
While attempting to jumpstart my Sun Ultra 10 this week, I encountered the following error: ok boot net:dhcp – install Boot device: /pci@1f,0/pci@1,1/network@1,1:dhcp File and args: – install 38800 panic – boot: Could not mount filesystem. Program terminated The machine was getting a kernel, but for some reason was unable to mount the Solaris miniroot. [...]
While debugging a performance problem this week, I noticed that one of our applications was issuing 1000s of read and write system calls each minute to file descriptor 19. To get a better idea of what file descriptor 19 was used for, I used the trusty Solaris pfiles utility: $ pfiles 8988 [ ..... ] [...]
While reading up on website performance monitoring applications last week, I came across the cricket HTTP-performance module. HTTP-performance allows you to graph the time it takes to connect to a website and to render a page. This sounded interesting, so I decided to download and install cricket. After reading through the beginners guide, I installed [...]
While perusing the opensolaris-dtrace discussion list this week, I came across Jonathon Adams recommendation to LD_PRELOAD the Solaris libumem library to find the source of a memory leak. Since I have never taken the opportunity to play with libumem, I decided to test it out this weekend. To get started, I created a C program [...]
