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watch process stack, sampled at 1s intervals

Terminal - watch process stack, sampled at 1s intervals
watch -n 1 'pstack 12345 | tac'
2009-02-05 18:17:00
User: mkc
Functions: watch
8
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watch process stack, sampled at 1s intervals

This command repeatedly gets the specified process' stack using pstack (which is an insanely clever and tiny wrapper for gdb) and displays it fullscreen. Since it updates every second, you rapidly get an idea of where your program is stuck or spending time.

The 'tac' is used to make the output grow down, which makes it less jumpy. If the output is too big for your screen, you can always leave the 'tac' off to see the inner calls. (Or, better yet--get a bigger screen.)

Caveats: Won't work with stripped binaries and probably not well with threads, but you don't want to strip your binaries or use threads anyway.

Show sample output | Add to favourites | Report as malicious

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What others think

This sounds very neat, but I can't find a copy of pstack for Mac OS X. Anyone know of one?

Comment by DEinspanjer 222 weeks ago

AFAIK, it's just a gdb script, so it shouldn't be OS-specific, though perhaps it would have to be tweaked slightly to work on OSX. Not sure where the canonical version is, but Debian seems to be getting it from RedHat.

Comment by mkc 221 weeks and 6 days ago

ubuntu pstack seems not work, gdb alias is:

gdb -ex "set pagination 0" -ex "thread apply all bt" --batch -p

Comment by unixmonkey3150 215 weeks and 5 days ago

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