OpenSolaris

So, I had the pleasure of meeting Brian Cantrill on Tuesday. dtrace rocks.

One of the things we need to constantly be aware of writing high-performance apps is the number of system call induced by a specific C routine. This is often achieved by using strace/ktrace/truss and guessing the boundaries or by simply looking at the function and enumerating the syscalls. However, as the function you are investigating scopes higher, the more complicated it is to ascertain the number of syscalls you expect.

Arrives... dtrace.

#!/usr/sbin/dtrace -s

#pragma D option quiet

uintptr_t domain;
uint64_t total;

:::BEGIN {
  self->last = 0;
}

pid$1::$2:entry
{
  self->ok++;
  self->identifier = "C function induced";
  / or set your custom identifier here
    domain = (uintptr_t )copyin(arg0, 4);
    self->identifier = copyinstr(*domain);
  /
  self->last = (self->ok == 1) ? timestamp : self->last;
  total = total + (self->ok == 1) ? 1 : 0;
}

syscall:::entry
/self->ok/
{
  self->syscall++;
  @[probefunc] = count();
}

pid$1::$2:return
/self->ok == 1 && self->syscall/
{
  printf("%s %d syscalls over %d us\n",
         self->identifier, self->syscall, (timestamp - self->last)/1000);
}
pid$1::$2:return
/self->ok == 1/
{
  @a["syscalls per invocation"] = quantize(self->syscall);
  self->syscall = 0;
}

pid$1::$2:return
/self->ok/
{
  self->last = (self->ok == 1) ? 0 : self->last;
  self->ok--;
  self->ok = (self->ok < 0) ? 0 : self->ok;
}

:::END {
  printf("Total syscalls witnessed:\n");
  printa(@);
  printa(@a);
}

# ./c2sys 4649 mail_queue_maintain_domain
C function induced 7 syscalls over 297 us
C function induced 7 syscalls over 233 us
C function induced 7 syscalls over 223 us
...
C function induced 7 syscalls over 214 us
C function induced 8 syscalls over 345 us
C function induced 7 syscalls over 249 us
^C
Total syscalls witnessed:

  mmap64                                                            1
  portfs                                                           57
  connect                                                          57
  getsockopt                                                       57
  setsockopt                                                       57
  so_socket                                                        57
  fcntl                                                           114

  syscalls per invocation                           
           value  ------------- Distribution ------------- count    
              -1 |                                         0        
               0 |@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@            147      
               1 |                                         0        
               2 |                                         0        
               4 |@@@@@@@@@@@                              56       
               8 |                                         1        
              16 |                                         0        

That solves that question...