Performance Tuning with DTrace
On April 1st, 2009, Jim Fiori (Principal Field Technologist) came to Virginia Tech to speak on the topic of Performance Tuning.
Often ignored in the curriculum, application performance is a huge concern for many companies. Knowing how to "twist the knobs" of a system or an application to increase its performance is a valuable skill, with many companies looking to improve their software by tuning its performance. Jim touched on some of the important foundation knowledge - Operating Systems, Networking, Databases, Computer Architecture, Queuing Theory - one must have to be a solid Performance specialist.
He also discussed some of the issues/methods involved in tuning and improving an application's performance, such as Garbage Collection in Java, the subtle inner-workings of UNIX commands, and efficient multi-threading paradigms.
Later, Jim introduced DTrace to a crowd of students who had only a passing knowledge of the technology. DTrace's probes incur no overhead while not in use, thus allowing the Operating System to function normally. When probes are activated, key metrics about the system are collected and can be represented in a useful way.
Applications, System Calls, Users, and many more can be monitored and measured in a level of granularity never-before-available. The crowd of students were quick to discover the sheer power of DTrace, and posed many hypothetical use cases and applications for DTrace.
Jim pointed the students to the DTrace Toolkit to learn more about the full power of DTrace. Already, several students have gone out, downloaded OpenSolaris, installed it in Virtual Box, and started using DTrace.
Here is a link to his presentation: Performance Tuning with DTrace - Jim Fiori
Often ignored in the curriculum, application performance is a huge concern for many companies. Knowing how to "twist the knobs" of a system or an application to increase its performance is a valuable skill, with many companies looking to improve their software by tuning its performance. Jim touched on some of the important foundation knowledge - Operating Systems, Networking, Databases, Computer Architecture, Queuing Theory - one must have to be a solid Performance specialist.
He also discussed some of the issues/methods involved in tuning and improving an application's performance, such as Garbage Collection in Java, the subtle inner-workings of UNIX commands, and efficient multi-threading paradigms.
Later, Jim introduced DTrace to a crowd of students who had only a passing knowledge of the technology. DTrace's probes incur no overhead while not in use, thus allowing the Operating System to function normally. When probes are activated, key metrics about the system are collected and can be represented in a useful way.
Applications, System Calls, Users, and many more can be monitored and measured in a level of granularity never-before-available. The crowd of students were quick to discover the sheer power of DTrace, and posed many hypothetical use cases and applications for DTrace.
Jim pointed the students to the DTrace Toolkit to learn more about the full power of DTrace. Already, several students have gone out, downloaded OpenSolaris, installed it in Virtual Box, and started using DTrace.
Here is a link to his presentation: Performance Tuning with DTrace - Jim Fiori
