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Show HN: A simple, pretty alternative to strace written in Rust

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Re: Show HN: A simple, pretty alternative to strace written in Rust

#4

Post by JAKWAI »

pojntfx wrote: post #3

Cool project, I really like the new structured output - that will make parsing stuff much easier than with strace! Is the performance overhead of tracing the syscalls comparable to strace?

Thanks for your feedback :D! I have actually never tested the performance compared to strace. I just used `time` to try to get a rough estimate and the two were basically taking the same time for the tasks I threw at them. I certainly think that there is _some_ overhead. Either in my _not fully optimized_ implementation or in the libc wrappers the *nix crate provides. Probably the former ;).

Re: Show HN: A simple, pretty alternative to strace written in Rust

#6

Post by pojntfx »

JAKWAI wrote: post #4
pojntfx wrote: post #3

Cool project, I really like the new structured output - that will make parsing stuff much easier than with strace! Is the performance overhead of tracing the syscalls comparable to strace?

Thanks for your feedback :D! I have actually never tested the performance compared to strace. I just used `time` to try to get a rough estimate and the two were basically taking the same time for the tasks I threw at them. I certainly think that there is _some_ overhead. Either in my _not fully optimized_ implementation or in the libc wrappers the *nix crate provides. Probably the former ;).

Oh right, that makes sense!

Re: Show HN: A simple, pretty alternative to strace written in Rust

#7

Post by JAKWAI »

alexellisuk wrote: post #5

It's been interesting watching you build this on Twitter. What prompted you to invest your time in this project vs the others that you were probably considering?

Thanks! I was invested in improving the user experience of strace. Strace is incredibly useful for debugging but I wouldn't consider it particularly "accessible". Understanding the output is quite a challenge at first. My goal was to remove this burden and therefore make strace accessible to a broader audience. I probably should also mention that Julia Evan's talks also had quite an impact on me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfD9IMZ9rKY :)

Re: Show HN: A simple, pretty alternative to strace written in Rust

#8

Post by suprjami »

Heavy professional strace user here.

afaics the wall clock time of the call is not implemented. This is effectively useless to me without that.

The second -ff is critical for following busy multiprocess stuff like a JVM.

If you aren't resolving every known struct then -x and -xx can be useful.

The FD resolution provided by -yy is not critical but can be a real time saver.

The flags I use most often are -ffttTyy -o -s

Re: Show HN: A simple, pretty alternative to strace written in Rust

#9

Post by JAKWAI »

suprjami wrote: post #8

Heavy professional strace user here. afaics the wall clock time of the call is not implemented. This is effectively useless to me without that. The second -ff is critical for following busy multiprocess stuff like a JVM. If you aren't resolving every known struct then -x and -xx can be useful. The FD resolution provided by -yy is not critical but can be a real time saver. The flags I use most often are -ffttTyy -o -s

Uhh thanks for your feedback. That's very valuable to me since I did not actually know anyone who regularly uses strace. I will definitely look into implementing these flags then!
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