Alan Hargreaves' Weblog

The ramblings of an Australian SaND TSC^* Principal Field Technologist

^{* Solaris and Network Domain Technology Support Centre - The group I work for}

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Wednesday Sep 29, 2004

What a week

I've been pretty quiet on the blogging front in the last week. The main reason for this is that I'm up to my eyes in a rather hot performace call involving large machines.

We had a bit of good news this morning with a major improvement by backporting a fix in the dispatcher code from Solaris 10 back to Solaris 8, but we still have a way to go. I'm not mentioning the actual fix here as we have only an interim patch¹ and have a bit of process to follow before we can get it back in to Solaris 8 and 9 as a proper patch. For example we have an awful lot of cross calls that we have not yet been able to find the source of.

The standard tools like lockstat, mpstat, vmstat and a few others like statit have been invaluable, but gawd it'd be nice to be able to use dtrace on this one. Finding the cross call source would certainly be simpler, and we could also have a closer look at some of teh code paths and where time is being spent.

Anyway, it's taken a few late nights and all weekend, but I am hopeful that the light at the end of the tunnel is not an oncoming train!

^{1. kind of like a binary fix but with some of the nice attributes of patches like easy backout and being able to make it incompatible with having another patch put over the top of it until it has been backed out.}

Posted at 09:45PM Sep 29, 2004 by Alan Hargreaves in Solaris | Comments[1]