writedist.d - write distrib. by process name. Uses DTrace. writedist.d writedist.d is a DTrace OneLiner to a report the write size and number of occurrences as a frequency distribution by process name. This can be useful to identify the behaviour of processes that are doing writes. Are they using many small writes, or fewer large writes. Docs/oneliners.txt and Docs/Examples/oneliners_examples.txt in the DTraceToolkit contain this as a oneliner that can be cut-n-paste to run. Since this uses DTrace, only the root user or users with the dtrace_kernel privilege can run this command. Solaris stable - needs the sysinfo provider.

This samples until Ctrl-C is hit. # writedist.d

process name The process name. There may be several PIDs that have the same process name, for example with numerous instances of "bash". The value reported will be the sum of them all.

value The size in bytes

count The number of occurrences that were at least this size

See the DTraceToolkit for further documentation under the Docs directory. The DTraceToolkit docs may include full worked examples with verbose descriptions explaining the output. writedist.d will sample until Ctrl-C is hit. Brendan Gregg [Sydney, Australia] dtrace(1M), truss(1)