In Mac OS X, I can use the "Activity Monitor" app to sample a process. It shows the call tree at the moment, which is very handy to debug a runaway process. I can find no such feature in Linux, so a co-worker whipped up a script to use gdb to attach to a process repeatedly, dump stack traces, and build a call tree. This works okay, but is very slow. Mac OS X can sample a process in a few seconds. Mine can take a few minutes (to sample it 10 times, for example).
Google turned up this, but I can't seem to download the code: http://libetpan.sourceforge.net/sample/index.html Does anyone have any other tools for sampling a process's call stack? --Dave /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
