[Gllug] Linux distro for small memory system

Tethys sta296 at astradyne.co.uk
Mon Oct 30 22:10:19 UTC 2006


Richard Jones writes:

>How about a better plan: (3) Get some decent tools together for
>measuring _real_ resource usage of programs, and NAME AND SHAME the
>sets of applications which are the worst offenders.

The tool for which you are looking is called SystemTap.

	http://sourceware.org/systemtap/

Yes, it did tell me that the JVM was the source of all of my woes.
Unsurprisingly, I'd pretty much guessed that already. What I hadn't
realised was the extent to which it was hogging my resources, though
(an idle JVM was responsible for over 95% of all the system calls
on my otherwise active machine). For me, SystemTap is one of a few
essential apps for developers/admins (as I've mentioned elsewhere,
valgrind is another). Until you can really look at your processes
in a fine grained way, you'll never know what your system is doing,
and SystemTap lets you do just that.

A combination of SystemTap and Dan's xrestop work should be an excellent
starting point. In fact, Dave Jones has already started some of the
naming and shaming. See his "Why userspace sucks" paper from OLS this
year:

	https://ols2006.108.redhat.com/reprints/jones-reprint.pdf

Tet
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