Slides demonstrating our systemtap usage in production

["Yichun Zhang (agentzh)" <agentzh at gmail dot com>]

Hello folks!

I'd like to share some of my slides that demonstrate our usage of
systemtap in the production environment:

* "The Way of Optimizing and Troubleshooting Our Lua Waf"
http://agentzh.org/misc/slides/beer-meeting-2013-04-19.pdf

* "Flame Graphs for online performance profiling"
http://agentzh.org/misc/slides/yapc-na-2013-flame-graphs.pdf

* "Introduction to off-CPU Time Flame Graphs"
http://agentzh.org/misc/slides/off-cpu-flame-graphs.pdf

Basically we've been using systemtap to do online performance tuning
and trouble shooting on various levels (often at the same time): code
in scripting languages, user-space C code (for scripting language VM,
nginx, and other system software), and the OS kernel.

To make stap scripting easier and more modular (especially for
userspace probing), I've introduced a simple macro-style language
named stap++ atop systemtap:

    https://github.com/agentzh/stapxx

This tool is mentioned in the 3rd slide deck given above. And quite a
few real-world examples using stap++ are also provided there.

I must say I've been getting a lot of inspiration from the dtrace
community, especially from the dtrace.org blog site:

    http://dtrace.org/blogs/

Also I'm getting a lot of help and support from the systemtap
community of course :) I always appreciate that ;)

We're still exploring more new possibilities with the dynamic tracing
technology while systemtap already keeps saving our days right now :)

I haven't found enough time to write proper articles on these things,
so I hope you can just enjoy the slides for now :)

If you find these slides interesting, you may also want to check out
some of my other slides listed on my site here:

    http://agentzh.org/#Presentations

Enjoy!
-agentzh