The document presents a discussion on modern Linux performance tools, particularly focusing on advanced measuring techniques for processes, IO, memory, and CPU. It emphasizes practical applications that can be utilized in production environments, referencing various tools like strace, sysdig, iostat, and perf. The author, Tanel Poder, shares personal expertise while promoting resources and a session on extending Oracle data warehouses with Hadoop.

1. gluent.com 1
Modern Linux Performance Tools
Tanel Poder
a long time computer performance geek

2. gluent.com 2
Intro: About me
• Tanel Põder
• Oracle Database Performance geek (18+ years)
• Exadata Performance geek
• Linux Performance geek
• Hadoop Performance geek
• CEO & co-founder:
Expert Oracle Exadata
book
(2nd edition is out now!)
Instant
promotion

3. gluent.com 3
Gluent
Oracle
Teradata
NoSQL
Big Data
Sources
MSSQL
App
X
App
Y
App
Z
Gluent as a data
virtualization layer
Open Data
Formats!
Session:
Extending Oracle
Data Warehouses
with Hadoop
Wednesday 10am
Executive Room 6
(small room!)

4. gluent.com 4
Topics
• Not much about basic stuff like vmstat/iostat
• Also nothing about SystemTap (or Dtrace)
• Practical stuff that you can (relatively) safely run in production
• Measuring / tracing processes
• Measuring IO
• Measuring Memory
• Measuring CPU

5. gluent.com 5
Measuring Process Activity - 1
• Strace
• man strace
• strace -p <PID>
• https://fritshoogland.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/profiling_of_oracl
e_using_function_calls.pdf
• SysDig
• sysdig fd.name contains tnsnames
• sysdig -p "%evt.arg.name" proc.name=cat and
evt.type=open
• csysdig
• http://www.sysdig.org/wiki/sysdig-examples/

6. gluent.com 6
Measuring Process Activity - 2
• /proc filesystem
• Proc filesystem in Linux is like V$/X$ views in Oracle
• man proc
• https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt
• http://blog.tanelpoder.com/2013/02/21/peeking-into-linux-kernel-
land-using-proc-filesystem-for-quickndirty-troubleshooting/
• psnapper (early prototype!)
• ./psnapper <seconds> <pid>
• ./psnapper 5 1234
• http://blog.tanelpoder.com/files/scripts/tools/unix/psnapper

7. gluent.com 7
Measuring IO
• iostat in RHEL 7
• /proc/<PID>/io
• iotop (or htop, atop)
• blktrace / blkparse (if we have time)
• blktrace -d /dev/sda -o - | blkparse -i -

8. gluent.com 8
Measuring Memory
• pmap -x <PID>
• http://tech.e2sn.com/oracle/performance/unix-performance-
tools/process-memory-matrix (Solaris example but roughly the same)
• cat /proc/PID/smaps
• grep MMUPageSize: /proc/`pgrep dbw0`/smaps |
sort | uniq –c
• https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt
• Smem
• sudo smem –u
• https://www.selenic.com/smem/

9. gluent.com 9
Measuring CPU
• perf top
• https://fritshoogland.wordpress.com/2012/07/10/the-linux-perf-
utility-with-el-6/
• perf record –g && perf report
• http://www.brendangregg.com/perf.html
• http://externaltable.blogspot.jp/2014/05/flame-graphs-for-
oracle.html
• perf stat
• http://blog.tanelpoder.com/2015/08/09/ram-is-the-new-disk-and-
how-to-measure-its-performance-part-1/

10. gluent.com 10
Linux performance references
• Brendan Gregg:
• http://www.brendangregg.com/linuxperf.html
• Luca Canali’s articles:
• https://db-blog.web.cern.ch/blog/luca-canali/2015-12-extended-
stack-profiling-ideas-tools-and-comments
• Frits Hoogland:
• https://fritshoogland.wordpress.com/

11. gluent.com 11
Thanks!
http://blog.tanelpoder.com
tanel@tanelpoder.com
@tanelpoder
We are hiring developers & data engineers!!!
http://gluent.com