Re: dtrace

[Gerd Möllmann]

Helmut Eller <eller.helmut@gmail.com> writes:

> On Thu, Jan 16 2025, Gerd Möllmann wrote:
>
>> Options remaining for the consumer:
>>
>> - Use dtrace(1) as a sub-process, with some D script like the one
>>   attached, and parse its output. One could produce XML or JSON in the D
>>   script.
>
> I think this is the most practical option.  But I think this also
> requires root privileges.  Perhaps sudo could be used to restrict this a
> bit.

Yes, it does require root on macOS. There's one enormous disadvantage of
running dtrace as a sub-process, though: I won't learn how to use
libdtrace :-).

> I think the important question is what to actually trace or what
> statistics to compute.  

That's true, of course. What I have is just an enabling feature, for
someone else to use, preferably :-). Should it land in GNU.

> Dtrace is very flexible, but perhaps it's more useful to help
> understand complicated situations than to build monitoring tools.

That's also true and Emacs could provide interesting probes like Python
does, and a ton of other programs/languages. And for monitoring igc, I
could probably use the SQLite output that igc.el now has. In a Jupyter
notebook to get statistic, plots and so on.

Just trying to have some fun here :-).