Plotting the sleep/wait chain of a process

Question

I often want to know why a process in the middle of a pipeline is sleeping and not busy processing data. My current method is:

1. find the pid of interest
2. sudo strace -pt pid to get the blocking syscall and object (fd, child, futex, etc.)
3. hit Ctrlc to detach strace
4. look up the appropriate object in /proc/pid
5. grep /proc/ or use lsof to find the other end of the pipe or process being waited on
6. repeat from #1 with the new pid

This is a pretty slow process that combines a lot of tools that don't play well together (strace in particular is hard to automate). Is there a tool that will do this loop for me and plot out the wait chain of a process, or at least make one iteration less awkward?

Linux 3.2, Ubuntu LTS 12, x64, under VirtualBox, if it matters.

Answer 1

most ps s now include a tree option, or a very aptly name related utility, ptree.

As my current work system doesn't have ptree, I currently use

ps fauw 

I think I also had a

ps taux (t making more sense than f)

Finally some ps have options to also include a programs threads in the view.

While this isn't the automated solution you (and I) would wish for, my experience is that there emerges a list of 'likely-suspects' in process trees, and just scanning the tree, you can often guess where the problem is.

IHTH