truss

Useful Solaris Commands

truss -c (Solaris >= 8): This astounding option to truss provides a profile summary of the command being trussed:

$ truss -c grep asdf work.doc
syscall              seconds   calls  errors
_exit                    .00       1
read                     .01      24
open                     .00       8      4
close                    .00       5
brk                      .00      15
stat                     .00       1
fstat                    .00       4
execve                   .00       1
mmap                     .00      10
munmap                   .01       3
memcntl                  .00       2
llseek                   .00       1
open64                   .00       1
                        ----     ---    ---
sys totals:              .02      76      4
usr time:                .00
elapsed:                 .05

It can also show profile data on a running process. In this case, the data shows what the process did between when truss was started and when truss execution was terminated with a control-c. It’s ideal for determining why a process is hung without having to wade through the pages of truss output.

truss -d and truss -D (Solaris >= 8): These truss options show the time associated with each system call being shown by truss and is excellent for finding performance problems in custom or commercial code. For example:

$ truss -d who
Base time stamp:  1035385727.3460  [ Wed Oct 23 11:08:47 EDT 2002 ]
 0.0000 execve(“/usr/bin/who”, 0xFFBEFD5C, 0xFFBEFD64)  argc = 1
 0.0032 stat(“/usr/bin/who”, 0xFFBEFA98)                = 0
 0.0037 open(“/var/ld/ld.config”, O_RDONLY)             Err#2 ENOENT
 0.0042 open(“/usr/local/lib/libc.so.1”, O_RDONLY)      Err#2 ENOENT
 0.0047 open(“/usr/lib/libc.so.1”, O_RDONLY)            = 3
 0.0051 fstat(3, 0xFFBEF42C)                            = 0
. . .

truss -D is even more useful, showing the time delta between system calls:

Dilbert> truss -D who
 0.0000 execve(“/usr/bin/who”, 0xFFBEFD5C, 0xFFBEFD64)  argc = 1
 0.0028 stat(“/usr/bin/who”, 0xFFBEFA98)                = 0
 0.0005 open(“/var/ld/ld.config”, O_RDONLY)             Err#2 ENOENT
 0.0006 open(“/usr/local/lib/libc.so.1”, O_RDONLY)      Err#2 ENOENT
 0.0005 open(“/usr/lib/libc.so.1”, O_RDONLY)            = 3
 0.0004 fstat(3, 0xFFBEF42C)                            = 0

In this example, the stat system call took a lot longer than the others.

truss -T: This is a great debugging help. It will stop a process at the execution of a specified system call. (“-U” does the same, but with user-level function calls.) A core could then be taken for further analysis, or any of the /proc tools could be used to determine many aspects of the status of the process.

truss -l (improved in Solaris 9): Shows the thread number of each call in a multi-threaded processes. Solaris 9 truss -l finally makes it possible to watch the execution of a multi-threaded application.

Truss is truly a powerful tool. It can be used on core files to analyze what caused the problem, for example. It can also show details on user-level library calls (either system libraries or programmer libraries) via the “-u” option.

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Last modified: March, 12, 2019