� Akeelah and the Bee | Main | Second Life �
May 11, 2006
In Search of Dtrace
I was fairly convinced that a defunct or zombie netstat process had been creating subtle disk activity. Because I use a couple P2P applications, I began to get worried about being 0wned. When the problem first occured I ran 'ethereal' and 'tcpdump' to make sure that no data was being passed across the wire. Nothing popped out at me. I then ran 'vmstat' and 'lsof' to get an idea of any rogue process might be writing out to files. Again nothing significant. At this point, I'm fairly confident that no foul play is afoot. Nonetheless, I'm still clueless as to what is causing my issue.
Ahh. If I were running dtrace on my Linux box, I'm certain that I could discover the problem. I do hope that someone ports this very slick app to Linux. All Sun Solaris users have the benefit of using this powerful utility. Hmm. I wonder if Solaris x86 comes with this tool ?
It appears that the pkg is quite extensible and capable of doing exactly what I need.
Some immediate needs:
All I want is to group the processes that are writing to /dev/hdaX and get a general idea of how long that processes have been active. I would also like to know the memory usage too.
Running 'vmstat -2' gives me an idea of what the threaded processes are running. Nonetheless, the report isn't nearly as clean as dtrace.
Anyone have any ideas??
Posted by AG at May 11, 2006 11:50 PM