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Thanks Brendan! A more navel-gazey question I believe you're well positioned to answer: For a long time, there seemed to be a conventional wisdom that Linux tr

by scarmig 11y ago

Thanks Brendan! A more navel-gazey question I believe you're well positioned to answer: For a long time, there seemed to be a conventional wisdom that Linux tracing was mediocre, because it doesn't have DTrace. Has Linux approached or passed the "caught up" point?

brendangregg 11y ago
It hasn't caught up yet, but it's getting pretty close. Although I'd think about it in terms of three dimensions: - technical capability: we should pass it this year. We'll be technical capable of solving pretty much the same issues and then some. - ease of use for script developers: bcc is currently ~10x more verbose to program. ply is much easier, but that project is in its early stages. This won't matter that much for Netflix, since much of the time staff will use this from a GUI (eg, Vector). It also won't matter that much for people who use the many provided tools, like opensnoop, tcpconnect, ext4slower, etc. It matters most for whoever codes the GUI and those tools (eg, me). - marketing, awareness, brand: Sun marketing, sales, trainers, and evangelists, did an awesome job - everyone knows about DTrace, even if they've never used it. In comparison, bcc/BPF (and many other Linux kernel technologies, like ftrace) have virtually zero marketing budget or professional marketing staff promoting them. Awareness will take the longest to catch up. I also summarized the current state of bcc/BPF in http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2016-03-28/linux-bpf-bcc-road-ahead-2016.html http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2016-03-28/linux-bpf-bcc-ro...
- brendangregg 11y ago
  ... I should add, a tipping point for awareness may be when a commercial performance monitoring company adds BPF support (and latency heat maps, etc), and then promotes this feature. There's a lot of performance monitoring companies out there, many are well funded, and have professional marketing/sales departments.

by scarmig 11y ago

brendangregg 11y ago

It hasn't caught up yet, but it's getting pretty close. Although I'd think about it in terms of three dimensions: - technical capability: we should pass it this year. We'll be technical capable of solving pretty much the same issues and then some. - ease of use for script developers: bcc is currently ~10x more verbose to program. ply is much easier, but that project is in its early stages. This won't matter that much for Netflix, since much of the time staff will use this from a GUI (eg, Vector). It also won't matter that much for people who use the many provided tools, like opensnoop, tcpconnect, ext4slower, etc. It matters most for whoever codes the GUI and those tools (eg, me). - marketing, awareness, brand: Sun marketing, sales, trainers, and evangelists, did an awesome job - everyone knows about DTrace, even if they've never used it. In comparison, bcc/BPF (and many other Linux kernel technologies, like ftrace) have virtually zero marketing budget or professional marketing staff promoting them. Awareness will take the longest to catch up. I also summarized the current state of bcc/BPF in http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2016-03-28/linux-bpf-bcc-road-ahead-2016.html http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2016-03-28/linux-bpf-bcc-ro...

brendangregg 11y ago
... I should add, a tipping point for awareness may be when a commercial performance monitoring company adds BPF support (and latency heat maps, etc), and then promotes this feature. There's a lot of performance monitoring companies out there, many are well funded, and have professional marketing/sales departments.