Posts in DTrace

Measuring system call time with procsystime

When debugging application performance problems related to high system time, I typically start my analysis by watching the system calls the application is issuing, and measuring how much time is spent in each system call. Gathering this information is simple with DTrace syscall provider, and the DTraceToolkit comes with the procsystime script to allow admins to easily analyze system call behavior. To use procsystime to measure how much time the sshd proceses are spending in each system call, we can run procsystime with the "-T" option to get the total time spent in all system calls, the "-n" option, and the process name to analyze (in the example below, using the string "sshd" will cause procsystime to analyze the system call behavior for all processes named sshd): The output will contain the name of the system call in the left hand column, and the time spent in that system call in the right hand column. There are additional options to display the number of calls to each system call, and you can also filter by process id if you want to measure a specific process…