Adam Leventhal

Adam Leventhal is a Solaris Kernel Engineer. He is one of the three authors of DTrace (the dynamic tracing facility new in Solaris 10), and is chiefly for the user-level tracing components. When he's not working on new features for DTrace, Adam has developed new observability tools for Solaris and spends a large amount of time applying those tools to bugs and performance problems. Adam joined the Solaris Kernel after graduating cum laude from Brown University in 2001 with a degree in Math and Computer Science.

"Performance Tuning Linux Applications With DTrace"

Despite the availability of faster and more sophisticated processors, developers still want to squeeze out every iota of performance from their applications. Due to growing complexity in applications and the underlying software and hardware stacks, finding bottlenecks in application performance is an increasingly difficult and daunting task. In November of 2003, Sun introduced DTrace, an open source framework that allows for observability at every level of the system from the lowest levels of the kernel to applications written in C/C++, Java, php and other languages. DTrace has been used on all kinds of applications with tremendous success, finding performance wins up to 3000% on business critical applications. Previously, DTrace's use had been limited to Solaris applications, but with the advent of the BrandZ Linux compatibility environment developers can examine their Linux applications using DTrace to find bugs and optimize performance. This session will describe how to use DTrace on Linux applications, and will include concrete examples of how DTrace has been used to improve performance.

Links and Resources

• Adam Leventhals Weblog
• BigAdmin: Dtrace
• OpenSolaris: DTrace
• SysAdmin Magazine: DTrace -- Most Exposing Solaris Tool Ever
• Sun Microsystems

Presentation Slides: PDF