I've worked on DTrace probes for a while now. It's
a really interesting tool. I've worked on MySQL Cluster
code since 1996 but this is the most advanced tool
I've used to see exactly what's going on inside the
MySQL Server and the data nodes.
I'm still at an early stage of using these DTrace probes
and there is still some work before they are publishable
but one can see very well what's going on inside the
processes in real-time.
My first finding was that I quickly discovered that CPU
percentage that is reported at 1% in prstat in Solaris
actually means that it uses 64% of a CPU thread 1% is the
percentage of the total CPU resources, this is different
to what I'm used to from top.
The benchmark I'm analysing is the same DBT2 I've used in
a fairly long line of analysis on MySQL Cluster performance
over the last 2 years. This benchmark can be downloaded
from www.iclaustron.com/downloads.html. It's a DBT2 based
on version 0.37 with lots of additions to make it work with
running multiple MySQL Server instances as is the case
with MySQL Cluster. Currently I'm running this on Solaris so
there will soon be a new release with some fixes needed to
run this benchmark on Solaris.
