3.1. Tools for Process Analysis Since there are so many tools for process analysis, it can be helpful to group them into general categories. Overall status tools. The prstat command immediately provides a by-process indication of CPU and memory consumption. prstat can also fetch microstate accounting details and by-thread details. The original command for listing process status is ps, the output of which can be customized. Control tools. Various commands, such as pkill, pstop, prun and preap, control the state of a process. These commands can be used to repair application issues, especially runaway processes. Introspection tools. Numerous commands, such as pstack, pmap, pfiles, and pargs inspect process details. pmap and pfiles examine the memory and file resources of a process; pstack can view the stack backtrace of a process and its threads, providing a glimpse of which functions are currently running. Lock activity examination tools. Excessive lock activity and contention can be identified with the plockstat command and DTrace. Tracing tools. Tracing system calls and function calls provides the best insight into process behavior. Solaris provides tools including TRuss, apptrace, and dtrace to trace processes.
Table 3.1 summarizes and cross-references the tools covered in this section. Table 3.1. Tools for Process AnalysisTool | Description | Reference |
|---|
prstat | For viewing overall process status | 3.2 | ps | To print process status and information | 3.3 | ptree | To print a process ancestry tree | 3.4 | pgrep; pkill | To match a process name; to send a signal | 3.4 | pstop; prun | To freeze a process; to continue a process | 3.4 | pwait | To wait for a process to finish | 3.4 | preap | To reap zombies | 3.4 | pstack | For inspecting stack backtraces | 3.5 | pmap | For viewing memory segment details | 3.5 | pfiles | For listing file descriptor details | 3.5 | ptime | For timing a command | 3.5 | psig | To list signal handlers | 3.5 | pldd | To list dynamic libraries | 3.5 | pflags; pcred | To list tracing flags; to list process credentials | 3.5 | pargs; pwdx | To list arguments, env; to list working directory | 3.5 | plockstat | For observing lock activity | 3.6 | TRuss | For tracing system calls and signals, and tracing function calls with primitive details | 3.7 | apptrace | For tracing library calls with processed details | 3.7 | dtrace | For safely tracing any process activity, with minimal effect on the process and system | 3.7 |
Many of these tools read statistics from the /proc file system, procfs. See Section 2.10 in Solaris™ Internals, which discusses procfs from introduction to implementation. Also refer to /usr/include/sys/procfs.h and the proc(4) man page. |
