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Lightweight, high-resolution monitoring for troubleshooting production systems

Author(s): Bhatia, Sapan; Kumar, Abhishek; Fiuczynski, Marc E; Peterson, Larry

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Abstract: Production systems are commonly plagued by intermittent problems that are difficult to diagnose. This paper describes a new diagnostic tool, called Chopstix, that continuously collects profiles of low-level OS events (e.g., scheduling, L2 cache misses, CPU utilization, I/O operations, page allocation, locking) at the granularity of executables, procedures and instructions. Chopstix then reconstructs these events offline for analysis. We have used Chopstix to diagnose several elusive problems in a largescale production system, thereby reducing these intermittent problems to reproducible bugs that can be debugged using standard techniques. The key to Chopstix is an approximate data collection strategy that incurs very low overhead. An evaluation shows Chopstix requires under 1% of the CPU, under 256KB of RAM, and under 16MB of disk space per day to collect a rich set of system-wide data.
Publication Date: 2008
Citation: Bhatia, Sapan, Abhishek Kumar, Marc E. Fiuczynski, and Larry Peterson. "Lightweight, high-resolution monitoring for troubleshooting production systems." In Proceedings of the 8th USENIX conference on Operating systems design and implementation (2008): pp. 103-116.
Pages: 103 - 116
Type of Material: Conference Article
Journal/Proceeding Title: Proceedings of the 8th USENIX conference on Operating systems design and implementation
Version: Final published version. Article is made available in OAR by the publisher's permission or policy.



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