pidpersec(8)

📦 version 0.36.1, in centos-stream 10, centos-stream 9, fedora 43, fedora 44

🎀 NAME 🎀

okay so the name says it all: pidpersec counts new processes (via fork()) 💖 and it uses Linux eBPF/bcc to do it ✨

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

pidpersec

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

bestie, pidpersec shows you how many new processes got created each second 🦋 lowkey this matters because loads of short-lived processes can cause performance issues, and they can totally hide from sampling tools like top(1) 🙈 pidpersec is one way to actually investigate that behaviour 💅

so how does it work? It traces the kernel sched_fork() function using dynamic tracing 🔍 heads up, this means it will need updating if sched_fork() ever changes 😭

⚠️ Since this uses BPF, only the root user can run this tool. no cap, you need to be root 👑

🧚 REQUIREMENTS 🧚

you'll need CONFIG_BPF and bcc 🫶

💜 EXAMPLES 💜

to count the new processes created each second, just run:

# pidpersec

🔥 OVERHEAD 🔥

this traces the kernel fork function and keeps an in-kernel count 🧠 user-space reads that count asynchronously. the rate is usually expected to be low (<< 1000/s), so the overhead is also expected to be negligible ✨ literally barely there 💅

🌈 SOURCE 🌈

this one is from bcc 💖

https://github.com/iovisor/bcc

also check out the bcc distribution for a companion _examples.txt file. it has example usage, output, and commentary for this tool 📚

🍓 OS 🍓

Linux 🐧

🦋 STABILITY 🦋

Unstable — it's still in development 🚧 so don't be shocked if things shift around 🙈

👑 AUTHOR 👑

Brendan Gregg, the icon 🫶

🔗 SEE ALSO 🔗

Okay bestie, that's the whole tea ☕💜 This was the USER COMMANDS manual page for pidpersec(8), dated 2015-08-18 🎀 Stay iconic and keep those forks in check! 🧚✨

📦 where this page comes from