Customer Reviews

Linux® Debugging and Performance Tuning: Tips and Techniques

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

The book does give a broad overview of linux debugging and profiling. The coverage is useful for a newbie but doesn't really add much value for the experienced linux programmer. It doesn't really cover any "performance tuning" except for a chapter on profiling. The real negative of this book for me is the screen shots of untarring a tool or applying a patch. These are just page wasting tactics and I hate it when authors resort to such tricks to fill pages.

I have read most of this book. I have kind of lost interest. I was under whelmed by the book. It is a bit out of date but 99% of the information is still good. This is not a bad book. I did not find errors. However, the author did not go into any real depth on methodologies for attacking problems. He never discussed when to use which tools. He just stitched together a bunch of getting started documents. The book should have had fewer subtopic (i.e. you don't really need to talk about a bunch of memory checkers 1 or 2 would have been fine) and then go into detail with some real world examples not "hello-world".

I recommend that a potential reader borrow this book from someone and skim it. Don't buy it

The previous commentator is misleading. Although the book doesn't really give very elaborate examples, it's at least good enough to introduce the reader to the subjects and tools as a starting point to dig around himself. The materials are certainly not all for beginners.
I gave it 4 stars, relative to 5 given to its sister book, "Linux Programming by Example: The Fundamentals" in the same series, which is much more refined.

Linux Debugging and Performance Tuning is not a book to sit down and read from cover to cover. It makes for a great reference book, and a handy guide to educating oneself on various Linux debugging and performance tuning tricks and tips.

The stated audience is "people developing or supporting Linux applications/kernels". As a system administrator, this is where my interest (and biases) show.

The book jumps in head first without a true intro to the subject of the first chapter (profiling). This style is consistent throughout the book which prevents this book from being a helpful tutorial, step by step guide, or classroom ready book towards learning debugging/performance tuning (sadly, as this subject could benefit from developers/administrators being firmly educated in these processes). Additionally a lot of space seems wasted on screen shots and sample code that doesn't contribute to the learning process. That said, the book does cover many useful and less well known tools. If you are looking for a reference book to assist in learning more about the arcane (and senior) skills of debugging and performance tuning, this would be a good choice. It doesn't go into great depths, so can be perceived as an introductory guide. It's less of a guide and more of an introduction that will assist a medium experienced administrator to obtaining useful search terms.

ETA:
I had forgotten that I had reviewed this book previously, and after re-reading the first 3 pages (literally) and deciding that I should check to see what other folks said about this book, I've realized that I was being super-positive in reviewing. As some of the lower rating folks have indicated, this book really wastes a lot of space in pointless diagrams. On page 4 there is a big picture of execution time shown on a watch. This is just an example of how the technical editors did not take time to really edit this book to have useful information and use pictures/diagrams to increase the understanding of the concepts presented. This book is not oriented at all towards administrators, and it seems like an afterthought to include them and have the title "performance tuning".

Anyone experienced will find themselves frustrated by the lack in crisp direction, anyone junior will be confused by the pointless additional pages. This is not a great reference book. This has a few interesting pieces of information, but it's lost in the overall book.

Learn how to debug Linux code at both kernel and application levels through a hands-on tutorial which covers all kinds of performance optimization issues. From cache misses and memory management issues to network performance and dump analysis from crashes, LINUX DEBUGGING AND PERFORMANCE TUNING TIPS AND TECHNIQUES is packed with real-world examples, with screen shots and code lists helping explain debugging logic and procedures. Highly recommended for any Linux systems administrator involved in debugging processes.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

Learn how to debug Linux code at both kernel and application levels through a hands-on tutorial which covers all kinds of performance optimization issues. From cache misses and memory management issues to network performance and dump analysis from crashes, Linux Debugging And Performance Tuning Tips And Techniques is packed with real-world examples, with screen shots and code lists helping explain debugging logic and procedures. Highly recommended for any Linux systems administrator involved in debugging processes.

If you knows Linux system well enough, don't buy this book. This is only for Linux beginner and doesn't have enough detail to go deep enough inside Linux. You may better off just looking at internet.