

Why Linux people lust after DTrace (and how DTrace saved Twitter) - smanek
http://softwareblogs.intel.com/2007/05/15/why-linux-people-lust-after-dtrace/

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staunch
You haven't suffered until you've experienced a Sun sales team desperately
rant for half an hour about how DTrace makes Sun a relevant technology company
again.

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irrelative
While I'm sure that DTrace does nifty things, this was probably the flimsiest
explanation of what makes it great that I've read. The summary seems to go
like this:

There's this great tool for Solaris called DTrace. It's only available on
Solaris, and it's so cool. One time, Twitter found a problem with it that
increased speed by 30%!!!

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patrickg-zill
DTrace is very useful for certain tasks that are traditionally hard to do on
Unix. Mainframe OSes for example make it easy to figure out who is doing the
most disk IO etc. while under Unix this is tough. DTrace allows for enough
visibility to figure out most things that a Mainframe OS would let you find
out.

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dazzawazza
I've watched a few lectures from the authors of DTrace and I've been nothing
but impressed. Especially with the Python ad Ruby instrumentation. Being able
to instrument ANY OS call with zero off overhead is pretty useful.

It's a shame that (for some reason) it's crippled on OS X and the FreeBSD port
is progressing so slowly (my dev and deployment platforms).

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bdr
My understanding is that Joyent, Twitter's host at the time, helped them
significantly with the dtrace stuff.

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leisuresuit
i wouldn't go so far as to say it saved twitter

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signa11
with some elbow grease, systemtap + kprobes on linux is not a bad combo at
all.

edit: comparison of systemtap and dtrace feature sets
[http://sourceware.org/systemta/wiki/SystemtapDtraceCompariso...](http://sourceware.org/systemta/wiki/SystemtapDtraceComparison)

