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Month: February 2005

Last week,
Mike,
Adam and I presented
the first “advanced” DTrace talk. That is, since shipping
DTrace, our presentations have been to people who have either never heard of
DTrace, or have heard of it but haven’t seen it
before, or have heard of it and seen it before and now want to
learn how to use it.
The time
for an advanced talk was clearly overdue; many of the questions
both in the
DTrace forum
and internally at Sun have indicated that the limits of
the DTrace
documentation
are being reached1,
and that an advanced presentation would be helpful to some users.
So given that others may find this presentation useful —
and with the caveats that
it doesn’t substitute for seeing it in the flesh2
and that it contains some rather arcane detail — the
“Advanced DTrace: Tips, Tricks and Gotchas” presentation can be found
here.

As the title implies, this really is a random collection of tips,
tricks and gotchas. Indeed, it’s so random the slides could pretty
much be in any order — there is no narrative arc to this presentation
whatsoever (there isn’t even a conclusion slide because there wasn’t
much to conclude), and the whole thing thus has a somewhat dream-like
(or nightmare-like?) quality. Apologies for that; there didn’t seem to
be a better way to present such arcana…


1 Yes, there are limits to the documentation — which is pretty
incredible considering that there’s already 400 pages of it.

2 For starters, it’s much easier to grok some of these
concepts when they can be demo’d on-the-fly. And by not seeing it live,
you
won’t have the pleasure of hearing me speak “a million miles an hour”
in

Dan Lacher’s words
. (To which all I will say in my defense is that I’ve never
had anyone fall asleep during one of my presentations…)

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