
One-stop performance analysis using atop - reader_1000
http://lwn.net/Articles/387202/
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cthalupa
I love atop - and install it everywhere that I can. The in depth metrics +
historical view is excellent.

That being said, I wouldn't call it a one stop tool for performance analysis.
Particularly due to the word 'analysis' \- it tells you what resource was
used, and what was using it. It doesn't tell you anything about /why/ the
process was using it. It doesn't help with hunting down regressions. It
doesn't give you insight in to what these processes are actually doing.

For that, you need to utilize
strace/ltrace/ftrace/dtrace/ktap/systemtap/perf/sysdig/whatever

(If interested in the actual analysis/engineering side of performance, I
recommend following Bredan Gregg's blog and buying his systems performance
book - [http://brendangregg.com/](http://brendangregg.com/) )

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sciurus
Atop was absolutely my favorite tool when I was supporting lots of interactive
systems and users complained to me that "foo is slow". Even better, the
logging let me determine the cause after the fact when a user complained "foo
was slow". The beauty of it is that it's using process accounting to gather
the resource utilization of everything that was running on the system between
two points in time. Compare that to a more standard metrics-gathering system
like collectd, where I would have to know the names of the processes I want to
monitor in advance
([http://collectd.org/documentation/manpages/collectd.conf.5.s...](http://collectd.org/documentation/manpages/collectd.conf.5.shtml#plugin_processes)).

The case study at
[http://www.atoptool.nl/download/case_leakage.pdf](http://www.atoptool.nl/download/case_leakage.pdf)
is worth a read to get a feel for what it's like to use atop.

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rdtsc
Haven't tried atop yet. I am used to htop + dstat. Those two give me a quick
overview of what is happening on the sytem.

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bbunix
atop is an awesome tool.... and the article is from 2010.

