William Cohen has been a developer of performance tools at Red Hat for over a decade and has worked on a number of the performance tools in Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora such as OProfile, PAPI, SystemTap, and Dyninst.
One common idiom in performance monitoring is how long did it take for a program to do something. For example you may want to know the time taken for database queries in PostgreSQL or just-in-time translations in a Java Virtual Machine. SystemTap and user-space markers in Linux packages make it much easier to determine the duration of those operations. The user-space markers compiled into Linux packages mark key points in the code where particular actions occur. The user-space markers also...
As I stare at this blank screen to start writing my first blog entry I have that same feeling that so many developers have when starting with an unfamiliar programming language or application. The developers in our group realize that it is not easy starting from nothing and we strive to make it easier to productively use SystemTap to investigate performance problems. A starting point for anyone's first use of SystemTap is the SystemTap Beginners Guide on the Red Hat...
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