Poor man’s contention profiling

Domas Mituzas — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 14:55:50 +0000

I wrote already about poor man’s query profiling techniques last summer. Today I’m going to share poor man’s contention profiling tool, for all these poor souls which do not have Solaris with dtrace or pstack, don’t want to run tcmalloc contention profiler, and simply need some easy hack to see ‘what the heck is going on in my server’. Here it is:

gdb \
    -ex "set pagination 0" \
    -ex "thread apply all bt" \
    --batch -p $(pidof mysqld)

Run few times, and you will have enough samples to start judging. Do note, this may stop the process execution for a second, so do not spam it in too tight loop.
Once you have results it is just a matter of 20-liner script to extract any useful calculations :)

P.S. I’d love to see efficient pstack implementation for 64-bit Linux :)

update: this now lives at http://poormansprofiler.org

domas mituzas » contention

Poor man’s contention profiling