In May I gave a talk at BayLISA about DTrace and the DTrace book. The slides are available here – although the talk deviated as I ran various live demos. It was videoed, and the first part is here:
In this talk spoke about Dynamic Tracing separately from DTrace, as understanding what dynamic tracing can do can lead to new ways to consider performance, and new questions to seek answers to; even if you ultimately don’t use DTrace. I gave an example of this (although perhaps a little esoteric) by talking about har – the most useful tool I never ran. It wasn’t the tool that was important – it was the idea of the metric, and an idea that was once proven to be technically possible. This is what the DTrace book contains – not just tools – but ideas.
This talk was held in the LinkedIn offices in Mountain View, California. It was very well attended, and there were many questions about DTrace, and also for Illumos – which I wasn’t expecting. If you are interested in Illumos, you can watch the recent Illumos panel video with Garret D’Amore, Bryan Cantrill, and Adam Leventhal. Bryan should also be speaking about Illumos at LISA’11 (December, Boston).