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USENIX Technical Program - Abstract - USENIX Annual
Conference, General Session - June 2000
Measuring and Characterizing System Behavior Using Kernel-Level
Event Logging
Karim Yaghmour and Michel R. Dagenais, Ecole Polytechnique de
Montréal
Abstract
Analyzing the dynamic behavior and performance of complex software
systems is difficult. Currently available systems either analyze each
process in isolation, only provide system level cumulative statistics,
or provide a fixed and limited number of process group related
statistics. The Linux Trace Toolkit (LTT) introduced here provides a
novel, modular, and extensible way of recording and analyzing complete
system behavior. Because all significant system events are recorded, it
is possible to analyze any desired subset of the running processes, and
for instance distinguish between the time spent waiting for some
relevant event (data from disk or another process) versus time spent
waiting for some unrelated process to use up its time slice.
Despite the extensive information gathered, experimental results show
that the LTT time and memory overhead is minimal (< 2.5% when observing
core kernel events). Moreover, due to the LTT and Linux kernel
modularity and open source code availability, the system is easily
extended both in terms of system events gathered, and of later
post-processing and graphical presentation.
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