8.3. Chapter Summary

This chapter provided a grab bag of Linux utility tools that are useful when investigating a performance problem. It introduced tools such as bash, watch, tee, and script, which automate the display and collection of performance data. It also introduced gnumeric, a tool that can both graph and analyze the results of text-based performance tools. It then investigated ldd and objdump, which can be used to track down which library a function is part of. It then described gdb, a tool that can investigate the execution and runtime information of currently running applications. Finally, this chapter described gcc, a tool that can produce binaries with symbolic debugging information that helps other performance tools, such as oprofile, to map events back to a specific source line.

In the upcoming chapters, we put together all the tools presented so far and solve some real-life performance problems.