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Dtrace Review

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21K subscribers • 7 videos on Hallway

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  • Recommended by 4 people: 4 on Hacker News.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2013 to 2025.
  • Presented by Bryan Cantrill

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

18K views14 years ago4 recommendations

Systems programmingTools and practiceDebuggingOperating systemsPerformance and optimization

Bryan Cantrill explains how DTrace enables dynamic tracing and debugging on live production systems, featuring a classic troubleshooting war story.

Google Tech Talks August 15, 2007 ABSTRACT Bryan Cantrill will discuss the Dtrace and how it can be used to significantly improve debugging both for development and live systems. Google engEDU Speaker: Bryan Cantrill

Why it's here

4 people recommend this

What people say. Widely recommended as an exceptional tech talk and a classic demonstration of the power of dynamic tracing.

dmiton Hacker News • Recommends

On “Ask HN: What's the best technical talk you've heard?”

I'm partial to Bryan Cantrill's Dtrace talk since it tackles a fundamental problem in software engineering and shows how to solve it using a new technology. The talk is more than 5 years old now, but sadly still as relevant as ever. link to this video
View on Hacker News

chuboton Hacker News • Recommends

On “Stripping kernel/uboot source to 10% for code reading”

Do you mean you prefer Linux over Windows? If so, then watch this talk: link to this video Now you will prefer Solaris/BSD to Linux :)
View on Hacker News

mwcampbellon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?”

A few of Bryan Cantrill's talks have already been mentioned here, but this one about DTrace, from 2007, is a gem: link to this video I especially like the part in the middle where he tells the story of how a an awful GNOME applet was killing a Sun Ray server, and how he tracked down the culprit with DTrace.
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qzncon Hacker News • Recommends

On “KTAP: A New Scripting Dynamic Tracing Tool For Linux”

I have no personal experience with either, but this dtrace guy does not like SystemTap: link to this video The whole presentation is a nice and impressive dtrace showcase.
View on Hacker News

mwcampbellon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Using Sun Ray thin clients in 2025”

For an extended, colorful telling of the experience outlined in that paper, check out Bryan's earliest recorded talk on DTrace, particularly the section starting at the timestamp in this link: link to this video
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mwcampbellon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Of Sun Ray laptops, MIPS and getting root on them”

Reading about Sun Ray reminds me of Bryan Cantrill's oldest online DTrace talk 1, particularly the story of how a GNOME 2 stock ticker applet overloaded a Sun Ray Server, and how Bryan used DTrace to find the culprit. 1: link to this video
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bcantrillon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Setting up a Sun Ray server on OpenIndiana Hipster 2025.10”

This is so great to see. I (like many!) have fond memories of Sun Ray. For me (and I suspect for others) Sun Ray will always represent the best of Sun -- and (of course!) some of the company's unrealized potential. As an aside on Sun Ray, it played a very important (if incidental) role in the development of DTrace in that one of the first truly production systems we used DTrace on was a Sun Ray server inside of Sun that was in a huge amount of pain. (I described this in the DTrace USENIX paper0, and also in my "Dtrace (sic) Review" talk at Google ca. 2007.1) 0 link 1 link to this video
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