OpenSolaris

Flagday: LatencyTOP for OpenSolaris

Date: Fri, 17 Jul 2009 10:06:57 -0700
From: Krishnendu Sadhukhan <Krishnendu.Sadhukhan at sun dot com>
To: on-all at sun dot com, onnv-gate at onnv dot eng dot sun dot com
Subject: Flagday: LatencyTOP for OpenSolaris

The putback for

        PSARC/2009/339 LatencyTOP for OpenSolaris
        6825817 Integrate latencyTOP into OpenSolaris

constitutes a flag day for all ON developers. You'll need to use
"nightly" to build and "bfu" to load the new archive.

This putback integrates the LatencyTOP tool into ON. LatencyTOP is an
observability tool that lets users locate latencies in their applications
and systems. By running this tool, users can find out where latencies
are happening and can write better code to improve the performance
of their applications and systems.

LatencyTOP is a command line tool that is being delivered through a new
package called SUNWlatencytop. Binaries will be installed under /usr/bin.

The tool uses the "proc", "sched" and "lockstat" DTrace probes, so the
version
of OpenSolaris in which these probes were integrated or any higher
version of
OpenSolaris must be used. Because the tool uses DTrace, a user must have
DTrace privileges in order to run it.

For more information on this new tool, please refer to

        http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/latencytop

Bugs should be filed in bugster under solaris/utility/latencytop. You can
also use the latencytop-dev at opensolaris dot org alias to report bugs, share
ideas
etc.

I would like to thank Lejun Zhu from Intel for porting this tool to
OpenSolaris.
I would also like to thank the following people

        Pat Bredenberg            (QE testing)
        Eric Saxe                      (code review and feedback for
improvement)
        Bart Smaalders            (feedback for improvement)
        Rafael Vanoni               (code review)
        Kuriakose Kuruvilla      (code review)
        Sherry Moore                (PSARC sponsor)
        David Powell                 (RTI approval)

and those I have may have missed, for their contribution to this
integration.

Krish