Performance Troubing Shooting with DTrace and cpustat

A new SDN article, "Achieving Near-Linear Scalability Using Solaris OS on NUMA Architectures", demonstrates how tools like Dtrace and cpustat along with an understanding of computer and application architecture can be used to identify performance issues. In the example, an application's performance bottleneck is identified then improved from 60k transactions per second (tps) to 90k tps.

One of the tools used in the investigation phase was cpustat, which was described in "Using Performance Counters on UltraSPARC T1 and T2 Processors."

Another useful tool is Corestat for UltraSPARC T2. It has been enhanced to understand the UltraSPARC T2 (it can be obtained from here) . The main enhancements are :

1. It now reports the utilization of each pipeline separately. By default only the integer pipe utilization is reported.
2. There is a new command line option "-g" added to report the FPU utilization along with integer utilization.
3. Corestat detects frequency of the target system at run time.