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Solaris Dynamic Tracing Guide
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Document Information

Preface

1.  Introduction

2.  Types, Operators, and Expressions

3.  Variables

4.  D Program Structure

5.  Pointers and Arrays

6.  Strings

7.  Structs and Unions

8.  Type and Constant Definitions

9.  Aggregations

10.  Actions and Subroutines

11.  Buffers and Buffering

12.  Output Formatting

13.  Speculative Tracing

14.  dtrace(1M) Utility

15.  Scripting

16.  Options and Tunables

17.  dtrace Provider

18.  lockstat Provider

19.  profile Provider

20.  fbt Provider

21.  syscall Provider

22.  sdt Provider

23.  sysinfo Provider

24.  vminfo Provider

25.  proc Provider

26.  sched Provider

27.  io Provider

28.  mib Provider

29.  fpuinfo Provider

30.  pid Provider

31.  plockstat Provider

Overview

Mutex Probes

Reader/Writer Lock Probes

Stability

32.  fasttrap Provider

33.  User Process Tracing

34.  Statically Defined Tracing for User Applications

35.  Security

36.  Anonymous Tracing

37.  Postmortem Tracing

38.  Performance Considerations

39.  Stability

40.  Translators

41.  Versioning

Glossary

Index

Overview

The plockstat provider makes available probes for the following types of events:

Contention Events

These probes correspond to contention on a user-level synchronization primitive, and fire when a thread is forced to wait for a resource to become available. Solaris is generally optimized for the non-contention case, so prolonged contention is not expected; these probes should be used to understand those cases where contention does arise. Because contention is designed to be (relatively) rare, enabling contention-event probes generally doesn't have a serious probe effect; they can be enabled without concern for substantially affecting performance.

Hold Events

These probes correspond to acquiring, releasing or otherwise manipulating a user-level synchronization primitive. As such, these probes can be used to answer arbitrary questions about the way user-level synchronization primitives are manipulated. Because applications typically acquire and release synchronization primitives very often, enabling hold-event probes can have a greater probe effect than enabling contention-event probes. While the probe effect induced by enabling them can be substantial, it is not pathological; they may still be enabled with confidence on production applications.

Error Events

These probes correspond to any kind of anomalous behavior encountered when acquiring or releasing a user-level synchronization primitive. These events can be used to detect errors encountered while a thread is blocking on a user-level synchronization primitive. Error events should be extremely uncommon so enabling them shouldn't induce a serious probe effect.