Measuring and characterizing system behavior using kernel-level event logging

  • Authors:
  • Karim Yaghmour;Michel R. Dagenais

  • Affiliations:
  • Department de génie électrique et de génie informatique, Ecole Polytechnique de Montréal, Montréal, Québec, Canada;Department de génie électrique et de génie informatique, Ecole Polytechnique de Montréal, Montréal, Québec, Canada

  • Venue:
  • ATEC '00 Proceedings of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

Analyzing the dynamic behavior and performance of complex software systems is diffcult. Currently available systems either analyze each process in isolation, only provide system level cumulative statistics, or provide a fixed and limited number of process group related statistics. The Linux Trace Toolkit (LTT) introduced here provides a novel, modular, and extensible way of recording and analyzing complete system behavior. Because all significant system events are recorded, it is possible to analyze any desired subset of the running processes, and for instance distinguish between the time spent waiting for some relevant event (data from disk or another process) versus time spent waiting for some unrelated process to use up its time slice. Despite the extensive information gathered, experimental results show that the LTT time and memory overhead is minimal (