What are some good profiling tools for Linux?

Question

I'm looking for some good profiling tools for Linux like OProfile. What I would like to see is how the operating system manages the interrupts, cache, read/writes, etc (lots of other intricate operations inside the OS) for different applications and workloads. Ofcourse, I can select a bunch of different system monitoring tools like sar, iostat, vmstat and what not, but using different type of tools and synchronizing all the data is a pain, especially when you are monitoring cache line, interrupts, etc.

Oprofile gives a nice overview and detailed analysis of what I want, but sometimes it fails to run on the latest kernels. I'm not sure why. But in any case, I would like to know if there is a nice alternative to this?

Answer 1

You can also use ksar and get graphical input of your sar file output. Moreover,use graphviz and rrdtool to generate graphical information from your input data.Its a one time effort but will be useful for you in long run.

Answer 2

Some tools that might be of interest for you

perf

kcachegrind

latencytop

lttng

Answer 3

atop, particularly recent versions, displays a raft of data on system performance. Most usefully it can be configured to run as a daemon, logging snapshots of data for future retrieval. I have it log every 60 seconds and the historic data has been invaluable.