Linux® Debugging and Performance Tuning: Tips and Techniques [Paperback]

Steve Best (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0131492470 | ISBN-13: 978-0131492479 | Publication Date: October 20, 2005

A unique resource that shows Linux kernel AND Linux application programmers how to write bug-free code that's optimized for performance. 1) Debugging techniques for Linux applications and the kernel 2) Performance tuning techniques for Linux application and the kernel. 3) Sample programs that show how debugging tools can find programming errors. 4) Sample programs that show how profiling tools can show which routines applications spend the most time in. 5) Key features that can be set up in the kernel to capture data once a problem occurs.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Learn Linux debugging and optimization—at kernel and application levels—hands-on!

This is the definitive guide to Linux software debugging and performance optimization at both the kernel and application levels. Using extensive Linux code examples, Steve Best systematically introduces open source tools and best-practice techniques for delivering bug-free, well-tuned code.

Drawing on his exceptional experience optimizing Linux systems for IBM, Best covers issues ranging from memory management and I/O to system processes and kernel bug messages. You'll walk through real debugging sessions, discovering the strategies experts use to debug even the most complex application- and kernel-related problems. You'll master sophisticated profiling techniques for identifying and resolving bottlenecks more quickly and learn how to capture the right data in the event of trouble. Coverage includes

• Bottleneck identification

• Code coverage

• Debuggers: gdb, kgdb, and KDB

• Memory management

• /proc kernel data analysis

• System process monitoring

• Network performance

• Oops bug messages

• Syslog and event logging

• Execution traces

• Profiling kernel behavior

• Cache misses

• User-Mode Linux

• Dynamic probes

• Crash dump analysis

• And more...

Linux® Debugging and Performance Tuning will be indispensable for every developer who needs to supercharge the Linux kernel and applications, and for every administrator and support specialist who must resolve Linux reliability or performance issues.

© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Steve Best works in the Linux Technology Center of IBM in Austin, Texas. He is currently working on Linux storage-related products. Steve has led the Journaled File System (JFS) for Linux project. Steve has worked on Linux-related projects since 1999 and has done extensive work in operating system development focusing on file systems, internationalization, and security. Steve is the author of numerous magazine articles, many presentations, and the file system chapters in Performance Tuning Linux Servers (Prentice Hall PTR 2005).

© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 456 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall (October 20, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0131492470
• ISBN-13: 978-0131492479
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,090,212 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Programmers debugging, October 22, 2005

By 

Anthony Lawrence "Unix, Linux and Mac OS X" (Middleboro, MA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Linux® Debugging and Performance Tuning: Tips and Techniques (Paperback)

If you are more of an administrator than programmer, pay attention to "Debugging" in the title and forget about "Performance Tuning"; this is primarily a programmer's book.

More specifically, it's a programmer's book that takes debugging all the way to the kernel, investigating tracing problems right down to kernel level. There's in depth coverage of the tools you need to do this and good case study examples are employed.

This is deeper than many will want to go, but if you do want to get into this level of debugging, this is a great place to start.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars explains powerful tools for programmers and sysadmins, October 31, 2005

By 

W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Linux® Debugging and Performance Tuning: Tips and Techniques (Paperback)

Best gives an advanced course in using important programming tools that come (free) with linux. These include gprof for profiling, gdb for debugging and gcov for testing code coverage. These can be used with C or C++ code made with gcc. Some of you who are from the unix world may well be familiar with these tools. Certainly, gcc and gdb have been around for over a decade.

Typically, many linux programmers don't get beyond using gcc. The book shows the power in the above tools, that can greatly enhance your understanding and performance of the code. Of these, I would consider gprof to be the most useful. You can see where the CPU spends most of its time when running your code. So you can focus on optimising the appropriate routines. Otherwise, it's very easy to get sidetracked streamlining a routine that has no appreciable overall effect on performance.

While the book treats gprof, gdb and gcov equally, I would recommend that you first get facile with gprof, for perhaps the best payoff.

The book also has lengthy treatments of other tools and methods. These tend to be for system administrators and developers of tools for those people. (Whereas the earlier tools are available to any user.) For example, the mysterious /proc is shown to be a nifty viewport into the runtime kernel activity. Without it and its associated tools, the latter could be largely a black box.

Also, to the extent that you can, when accessing /proc, try doing this very carefully. Type slowly and check what you have typed, before pressing return. Yes, this sounds mundane. But it is possibly to really muck up the system.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Quick guide to good tools, October 30, 2006

By 

Hari Lalgudi - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Linux® Debugging and Performance Tuning: Tips and Techniques (Paperback)

Easily readable. Excellent for beginners(Oops, ltt, valgrind, /proc). Some boring sections(ps, network debugging tools).

In the next version, it would be nice to have Xenmon, SystemTap, Perfmon2 & section on general hw counters (TLB miss, memory latency). Two pages(277-278) for cache misses is weak.