PT-PMP(1)

📦
version 3.7.1_4 · 5 versions
, in arch rolling

💅 pt-pmp — the manual page, but make it make sense

okay so this is the pt-pmp(1) page from the User Contributed Perl Documentation section, and bestie, you're gonna want to sit down for this one because it's actually so good 🫶

✨ NAME ✨

pt-pmp — aggregate GDB stack traces for a selected program. literally that's the whole gig 😌

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

Usage: pt-pmp [OPTIONS] [FILES]

pt-pmp is a poor man's profiler, inspired by <http://poormansprofiler.org>. It can create and summarize full stack traces of processes on Linux. And ngl, summaries of stack traces are like genuinely invaluable for diagnosing what a process is waiting for — it's giving detective energy 🔍✨

💀 RISKS 💀

okay so Percona Toolkit is mature, proven in the real world, and well tested — but all database tools can pose a risk to the system and the database server. so before you use this tool, please please please:

  • Read the tool's documentation
  • Review the tool's known "BUGS"
  • Test the tool on a non-production server
  • Backup your production server and verify the backups

no cap, do all four 🙏

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

pt-pmp performs two tasks: it gets a stack trace, and it summarizes the stack trace. If a file is given on the command line, the tool skips the first step and just aggregates the file. easy 💅

To summarize the stack trace, the tool extracts the function name (symbol) from each level of the stack, and combines them with commas. It does this for each thread in the output. Afterwards, it sorts similar threads together and counts how many of each one there are, then sorts them most-frequent first. iconic sorting behaviour, honestly 👑

pt-pmp is a read-only tool. However — and this is the big however — collecting GDB stacktraces is achieved by attaching GDB to the program and printing stack traces from all threads. This will freeze the program for some period of time, ranging from a second or so to much longer on very busy systems with a lot of memory and many threads in the program 😭 In the tool's default usage as a MySQL profiling tool, this means that MySQL will be unresponsive while the tool runs — although if you are using the tool to diagnose an unresponsive server, there is really no reason not to do this. In addition to freezing the server, there is also some risk of the server crashing or performing badly after GDB detaches from it. yeah. that part. 💀

Dumpers eu and pteu use eu-stack (<https://sourceware.org/elfutils/>) instead of GDB. eu-stack collects stacks with minimal impact and does not cause same issues as GDB does. Dumpers eu and pteu are recommended to use instead of GDB and one of them will be default dumper in future versions. slay, upgrade your vibes 🌈

🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

  • --binary — short form: -b; type: string; default: mysqld. Which binary to trace. iykyk 🧚
  • --dumper — short form: -d; type: string; default: gdb. Which dumper use to get stack traces (gdb: gdb, eu: eu-stack, pteu: pt-eustack-resolver).
  • --help — Show help and exit. the classic 🫶
  • --interval — short form: -s; type: int; default: 0. Number of seconds to sleep between "--iterations".
  • --iterations — short form: -i; type: int; default: 1. How many traces to gather and aggregate.
  • --lines — short form: -l; type: int; default: 0. Aggregate only first specified number of many functions; 0=infinity. infinity! we love an unlimited queen ✨
  • --pid — short form: -p; type: int. Process ID of the process to trace; overrides "--binary".
  • --readnever — Pass option "--readnever" to "gdb". With this option "gdb" will not read symbol files, thus produce stack traces way faster. However, such traces may not be sufficient for the diagnostic. fast but maybe not enough info — pick your fighter ⚡
  • --save-samples — short form: -k; type: string. Keep the raw traces in this file after aggregation. hoarder behaviour, honestly valid 💾
  • --tids — short form: -t; type: string; default: *. Extract traces only for specific tids.

This option uses regular expressions to select threads. For example, if the collected stack trace has data for threads:

[New Thread 0x52173940 (LWP 23846)]
[New Thread 0x52132940 (LWP 23845)]
[New Thread 0x520f1940 (LWP 23844)]
[New Thread 0x520b0940 (LWP 23798)]
[New Thread 0x5206f940 (LWP 23776)]
[New Thread 0x5202e940 (LWP 23775)]
[New Thread 0x51fed940 (LWP 23774)]
[New Thread 0x51fac940 (LWP 23728)]
[New Thread 0x51f6b940 (LWP 23727)]
[New Thread 0x51f2a940 (LWP 21264)]
[New Thread 0x51ee9940 (LWP 21263)]
[New Thread 0x51ea8940 (LWP 21201)]

-t 21 will print stack traces for threads 21264, 21263, 21201

-t 21201,23846 will print stack traces for threads 21201, 23846

-t 21201,237.8 will print stack traces for threads 21201, 23798, 23728

see how the regex just vibes through the numbers? chef's kiss 🍓

  • --version — Show version and exit.

🌿 ENVIRONMENT 🌿

This tool does not use any environment variables. nothing. zero. empty. a clean slate 🍃

🧚 SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS 🧚

This tool requires Bash v3 or newer. If no backtrace files are given, then gdb is also required to create backtraces for the process specified on the command line.

🙈 BUGS 🙈

For a list of known bugs, see <https://jira.percona.com/projects/PT/issues>.

Please report bugs at <https://jira.percona.com/projects/PT>. Include the following information in your bug report:

  • Complete command-line used to run the tool
  • Tool "--version"
  • MySQL version of all servers involved
  • Output from the tool including STDERR
  • Input files (log/dump/config files, etc.)

If possible, include debugging output by running the tool with "PTDEBUG"; see "ENVIRONMENT". the more info the better, bestie 💖

🚨 ATTENTION 🚨

Using <PTDEBUG> might expose passwords. When debug is enabled, all command line parameters are shown in the output.

like. ALL of them. so maybe don't paste that into the group chat 😭

⭐ DOWNLOADING ⭐

Visit <http://www.percona.com/software/percona-toolkit/> to download the latest release of Percona Toolkit. Or, get the latest release from the command line:

wget percona.com/get/percona-toolkit.tar.gz

wget percona.com/get/percona-toolkit.rpm

wget percona.com/get/percona-toolkit.deb

You can also get individual tools from the latest release:

wget percona.com/get/TOOL

Replace "TOOL" with the name of any tool. mix and match, it's a build-your-own-adventure 🌈

👑 AUTHORS 👑

Baron Schwartz, based on a script by Domas Mituzas (<http://poormansprofiler.org/>)

💜 ABOUT PERCONA TOOLKIT 💜

This tool is part of Percona Toolkit, a collection of advanced command-line tools for MySQL developed by Percona. Percona Toolkit was forked from two projects in June, 2011: Maatkit and Aspersa. Those projects were created by Baron Schwartz and primarily developed by him and Daniel Nichter. Visit <http://www.percona.com/software/> to learn about other free, open-source software from Percona. lore drop 📖✨

This program is copyright 2011-2026 Percona LLC and/or its affiliates, 2010-2011 Baron Schwartz.

THIS PROGRAM IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, version 2; OR the Perl Artistic License. On UNIX and similar systems, you can issue man perlgpl or man perlartistic to read these licenses.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License, version 2 along with this program; if not, see <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

🌸 VERSION 🌸

pt-pmp 3.7.1-4

and that's the whole thing, bestie 💅✨ this page was brought to you by perl v5.42.2, dated 2026-09-01, and filed under PT-PMP(1) — go forth and profile responsibly, mwah 🫶💖🎀

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