On: Snappy-start: Tool for launching a Linux process from a snapshot

[jbverschoor]

Sounds like an ideal tool for debugging.

Trace while running, take a snapshot when there's something wrong

[xyzzy123 → jbverschoor]

It's a cool hack, but only useful for fast startup just at this point. It can't do network sockets (for obvious reasons), or things like gettimeofday or even fds just now.

Reminds me of a Lisp image dump.

[sanxiyn → jbverschoor]

If you want a debugging tool, try http://rr-project.org/

[mateuszf → sanxiyn]

I'd imagine that it has some overhead. So running it on production all the time would not make much sense. Because sometimes restarting a process makes it very hard to reproduce the bug. But snasphost / restore would handle that case. The problem is - what to do with file / network descriptors?

[stcredzero → jbverschoor]

Lots of Smalltalk production systems did exactly this. One could also log into running production systems and inspect live objects.