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An Interview with DTrace Guru Jarod Jenson
Peter Baer Galvin
The world is still in the early days of exploring and
using DTrace, Sun's extraordinary new performance analysis tool.
There are, however, some trends already revealing themselves. Specifically, all programs have performance problems,
and (almost?) all performance problems on Solaris 10 systems can be revealed via DTrace. Jarod Jenson, Chief Systems
Architect at Aeysis, spends a lot of his time using DTrace to track down
performance problems.
I thought it would be interesting to talk with Jarod
and hear his thoughts on DTrace. Read on and you will find that he does
have many revealing things to say. Especially of interest is his
information about common performance problems he's finding. Even if
you don't use DTrace (and of course you should), those field findings
should still be of use in helping to improve your programs and systems.
Consider this column to be a case of free, remote performance tuning.
Q & A with Jarod
Peter Galvin: Tell us a little about yourself?
Jarod Jenson: I am
currently the Chief Systems Architect at Aeysis. I spend the majority of my
time traveling to two to three customers per week looking at performance
problems on business-critical systems. I focus mostly on the Solaris
platform because of DTrace, but I also look at Linux-based applications.
PG: How long have you been using DTrace?
DTrace for a little over four years now. I was using DTrace before its
integration into Solaris and was the first Alpha customer of DTrace.
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