Solaris' Dtrace in Detail

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Posted by CowboyNeal on Friday July 9, 2004 @12:04AM from the d-proof-is-in-d-pudding dept.

paulkoan writes "The Register has a further details about the new Dtrace systems utility bundled with Solaris 10, along with pictures of the authors, and user testimonials. It also highlights Suns vague assurances that this (if it lives up to the hype) amazing utility may or may not end up in the public domain."

10 of 212 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

And what is DTrace? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-07-09 00:08 · Score: 4, Insightful

It looks like it's an allround system monitoring and administration tool. But how is it different/better than a well-sorted collection of individual tools, each doing one job as good as possible?
1. Re:And what is DTrace? by christophersaul · 2004-07-09 02:30 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  Reading the article would help you find out.
terrrible article by XMichael · 2004-07-09 00:09 · Score: 4, Insightful

This article seems like it was written by Sun. I bet it's one of them junket articles, Sun must be a major sponsor of theregister.co.uk or something...

The article says what this D-Trace does, but yet, doesn't... Not to mention it's neither objective, review like, and even fails to mention alternatives or relative tools

Definately one of the poorest software article's I've seen in a while

Slashdot is making me bitter (-;
Complete CCTV Security Cameras

--
Gamblers Forum
1. Re:terrrible article by Handyman · 2004-07-09 00:56 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Sun must be a major sponsor of theregister.co.uk or something...
  
  I must agree that the article is pretty positive about the whole thing. But a positive review is not necessarily a bought review. In fact, the article does contain an angle that is not likely to be sponsored by Sun: open sourcing it, and open sourcing solaris. They explicitly make fun of Sun's president, who is evading their questions about open sourcing DTrace. From the article:
  
  So there you have it. DTrace may or may not end up in the public domain. Glad that's settled.
just to save you all some trouble by chegosaurus · 2004-07-09 00:17 · Score: 5, Insightful

No, linux does not already do this.

Solaris users could not care less whether Sun ports it to linux or not.

Sun are *not* evil because they don't immediately give away the source to a product which has taken them years and $$$s to develop and which gives them an edge in a competetive market.

Some people just prefer Solaris. If you prefer linux, that's fine.
1. Re:just to save you all some trouble by chegosaurus · 2004-07-09 00:34 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Wasn't meant to sound superior! I use both (and OpenBSD) myself. I'm expecting this thread to be full of ill-informed "linux does this Slowaris is teh sux" posts and whining about "why won't they GPL it it"?
  
  So I guess I'm saying, if you're 100% linux, that's cool. I certainly don't need to hear about j00r leet gentoo boxen in a Solaris thread. You know the kind of person I mean!
Sun comming arround? by argoff · 2004-07-09 01:44 · Score: 3, Insightful

There's an old saying, "you are what you hold yourself accountable to".

In that sense, Sun is no Microsoft. They are a hardware company that provides services, plain and simple. The only reason why they are cold to Linux is because it pits Sun servers directly against x86 commodity PC's - otherwise they are all for it.

Once the dust settles on their bread and butter revenue stream, you can better believe that they will be open-source all the way. But right now they need to force some differentation with their hardware because in most cases they simply can't compete against an x86 farm in the server space. All the rest of the BS about new accomplishment is just propaganda, I would ignore it.
Re:Interesting... by gr8_phk · 2004-07-09 03:21 · Score: 3, Insightful

"Maybe the closest thing to a Unix killer app that has existed for a while."
Ya, sysadmins are always trying to optimize code in the core applications they bought from vendors. NOT.
It's not useless, but the examples cited were from application developers optimizing their code.
Re:Microsoft perfmon by Zode · 2004-07-09 04:42 · Score: 5, Insightful

are you kidding? DTrace lets you do this not just per process, but per instruction, across CPUs. Comparing DTrace to perfmon is like comparing a Ferrari to a tricycle.
Code Review by ansible · 2004-07-09 06:59 · Score: 2, Insightful

I was reading the examples of using DTrace to spot performance issues.
It seems to be that most of them could have been caught with code reviews.
Perhaps with tools like DTrace, you can spot performance issues more quickly. But I believe a good code inspection regime could catch these problems and more.