| .TH ext4slower 8 "2016-02-11" "USER COMMANDS" |
| .SH NAME |
| ext4slower \- Trace slow ext4 file operations, with per-event details. |
| .SH SYNOPSIS |
| .B ext4slower [\-h] [\-j] [\-p PID] [min_ms] |
| .SH DESCRIPTION |
| This tool traces common ext4 file operations: reads, writes, opens, and |
| syncs. It measures the time spent in these operations, and prints details |
| for each that exceeded a threshold. |
| |
| WARNING: See the OVERHEAD section. |
| |
| By default, a minimum millisecond threshold of 10 is used. If a threshold of 0 |
| is used, all events are printed (warning: verbose). |
| |
| Since this works by tracing the ext4_file_operations interface functions, it |
| will need updating to match any changes to these functions. |
| |
| Since this uses BPF, only the root user can use this tool. |
| .SH REQUIREMENTS |
| CONFIG_BPF and bcc. |
| .SH OPTIONS |
| \-p PID |
| Trace this PID only. |
| .TP |
| min_ms |
| Minimum I/O latency (duration) to trace, in milliseconds. Default is 10 ms. |
| .SH EXAMPLES |
| .TP |
| Trace synchronous file reads and writes slower than 10 ms: |
| # |
| .B ext4slower |
| .TP |
| Trace slower than 1 ms: |
| # |
| .B ext4slower 1 |
| .TP |
| Trace slower than 1 ms, and output just the fields in parsable format (csv): |
| # |
| .B ext4slower \-j 1 |
| .TP |
| Trace all file reads and writes (warning: the output will be verbose): |
| # |
| .B ext4slower 0 |
| .TP |
| Trace slower than 1 ms, for PID 181 only: |
| # |
| .B ext4slower \-p 181 1 |
| .SH FIELDS |
| .TP |
| TIME(s) |
| Time of I/O completion since the first I/O seen, in seconds. |
| .TP |
| COMM |
| Process name. |
| .TP |
| PID |
| Process ID. |
| .TP |
| T |
| Type of operation. R == read, W == write, O == open, S == fsync. |
| .TP |
| OFF_KB |
| File offset for the I/O, in Kbytes. |
| .TP |
| BYTES |
| Size of I/O, in bytes. |
| .TP |
| LAT(ms) |
| Latency (duration) of I/O, measured from when it was issued by VFS to the |
| filesystem, to when it completed. This time is inclusive of block device I/O, |
| file system CPU cycles, file system locks, run queue latency, etc. It's a more |
| accurate measure of the latency suffered by applications performing file |
| system I/O, than to measure this down at the block device interface. |
| .TP |
| FILENAME |
| A cached kernel file name (comes from dentry->d_iname). |
| .TP |
| ENDTIME_us |
| Completion timestamp, microseconds (\-j only). |
| .TP |
| OFFSET_b |
| File offset, bytes (\-j only). |
| .TP |
| LATENCY_us |
| Latency (duration) of the I/O, in microseconds (\-j only). |
| .SH OVERHEAD |
| This adds low-overhead instrumentation to these ext4 operations, |
| including reads and writes from the file system cache. Such reads and writes |
| can be very frequent (depending on the workload; eg, 1M/sec), at which |
| point the overhead of this tool (even if it prints no "slower" events) can |
| begin to become significant. Measure and quantify before use. If this |
| continues to be a problem, consider switching to a tool that prints in-kernel |
| summaries only. |
| .PP |
| Note that the overhead of this tool should be less than fileslower(8), as |
| this tool targets ext4 functions only, and not all file read/write paths |
| (which can include socket I/O). |
| .SH SOURCE |
| This is from bcc. |
| .IP |
| https://github.com/iovisor/bcc |
| .PP |
| Also look in the bcc distribution for a companion _examples.txt file containing |
| example usage, output, and commentary for this tool. |
| .SH OS |
| Linux |
| .SH STABILITY |
| Unstable - in development. |
| .SH AUTHOR |
| Brendan Gregg |
| .SH SEE ALSO |
| biosnoop(8), funccount(8), fileslower(8) |