4.3. Chapter Summary

This chapter covered how to track the CPU performance bottlenecks of individual processes. You learned to determine how an application was spending its time by attributing the time spent to the Linux kernel, system libraries, or even to the application itself. You also learned how to figure out which calls were made to the kernel and system libraries and how long each took to complete. Finally, you learned how to profile an application and determine the particular line of source code that was spending a large amount of time. After mastering these tools, you can start with an application that hogs the CPU and use these tools to find the exact functions that are spending all the time.

Subsequent chapters investigate how to find bottlenecks that are not CPU bound. In particular, you learn about the tools used to find I/O bottlenecks, such as a saturated disk or an overloaded network.