Darryl Gove's blog

Sample chapter from Solaris Application Programming available

There's a sample chapter from my book up on sun.com/books.

It's chapter 4 which is the chapter which discusses the tools that come with Solaris and Sun Studio. The chapter exists because I find that there are some tools that I use every day, and some tools that I might touch once a month, and some that I use even more rarely. The problems I hit are:

• What was the name of the tool which ....?
• What are the command line options to ...?
• Is there a tool to ....?

Obviously I hit the third problem very infrequently, but I'm sometimes surprised when I discover a tool which I'd previously never heard of which just happens to do exactly what I need. Anyway I hope you find the chapter useful. It's one of my two solutions to this problem.

The other solution is spot which attempts to collect all the data that you routinely need for performance analysis of an application. So it calls the other tools - so you don't need to know the commandlines, or the names of the tools. One of the things that should be noticeable with spot is that it has few commandline options. I was hoping that we'd end up with none, but some are inevitable; but those are really house-keeping options (where to put the report, what to call it). There's only -X which generates an extended report, given the time it can take to get the data, it seemed appropriate to do the high value stuff quickly with an option for the tool to take a longer time when the user specified that it was ok.

Posted at 10:07AM Jan 28, 2008 by Darryl Gove in Sun  |