Pensieri di un lunatico minore

Leapord, DTrace and Xray

As we all eagerly await the release of Leapord sometime next year, Apple has been slowly leaking out information. One of the things that doesn’t get a lot of attention, but really excites me is Xray, which is Apple’s new performance visualization tool. It looks a bit like GarageBand for performance.

The thing that makes this really interesting is that Apple has signed on to the DTrace bandwagon. This means there’s a framework for collecting and monitoring information in real-time, with relatively minimal overhead. Leveraging this, you can create new providers to instrument other things, and people are already doing that. For example, there is a provider for Ruby (and by way of that, Rails) and another for Python, which give you the ability to not just instrument the interpreters, but to correlate that data with everything else going on in the system and trace up and down the kernel.

While I often rail against obsession over performance, it’s more an attack on the early-optimization craze. When it comes time to have to deal with performance—namely, when you’ve identified a failing and a target—you need the best tools available, and it is looking more and more like DTrace and Xray are some of them.