Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 18th Jan 2008 20:18 UTC, submitted by SEJeff
"The Intel Open Source Technology Center is pleased to announce the release of version 0.1 of LatencyTOP, a tool for developers to visualize system latencies. Slow servers, skipping audio, jerky video - everyone knows the symptoms of latency. But to know what's really going on in the system, what's causing the latency, and how to fix it... Those are difficult questions without good answers right now. LatencyTOP is a Linux tool for software developers (both kernel and userspace), aimed at identifying where system latency occurs, and what kind of operation/action is causing the latency to happen. By identifying this, developers can then change the code to avoid the worst latency hiccups."
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Member since:
2007-08-04
Encouraging customers to look at latencies for performance analysis is really important.
I quickly browsed the code, and it appears that this is implemented by statically defining latency metrics in the kernel. Wow! Was this written a decade ago?
Performance analysis these days is about dynamic tracing using DTrace, which appears in Solaris 10, MacOS X, and other operating systems. DTrace is able to read these latencies and *thousands* more, in *all* layers of the software stack *without* modifying them.
The latencytop engineers need to look at DTrace and not reinvent a wheel that is already obsolete. DTrace does use statically defined trace points at times, but when appropriate and complementary to the dynamic tracing system.
If this tool does get customers to think more carefully about latency metrics, then that will certainly be valuable. All roads lead to DTrace.