pidpersec.bt(8)

📦 version 0.17.0, in debian bookworm

🌸 pidpersec.bt — the manual page, but make it cute (8) 🌸

okay bestie, welcome to pidpersec.bt from the System Manager's Manual section of your life 💖 it lives in section 8, it's a bpftrace/eBPF situation, and it's genuinely so useful. let's get into it.

✨ NAME ✨

pidpersec.bt — counts new processes (via fork()). uses bpftrace/eBPF. that's the whole vibe. 💅

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

pidpersec.bt

yeah that's it. no flags, no arguments, no drama. she just runs. 👑

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

so pidpersec shows you how many new processes got created each second. that's it, that's the girl. 🎀

why do you care? because bestie, there can be performance issues caused by a ton of short-lived processes — and those little guys are basically invisible to sampling tools like top(1). they spawn, they die, they never get sampled. pidpersec gives you one way to actually investigate that behavior. 🕵️‍♀️

how does she do it? she works by tracing the tracepoint:sched:sched_process_fork tracepoint. iconic. ⭐

⚠️ since this uses BPF, only the root user can use this tool. like, actually only root. no cap.

✨ REQUIREMENTS ✨

  • CONFIG_BPF 🫶
  • bpftrace 🦋

✨ EXAMPLES ✨

count new processes, printing per-second summaries until you hit Ctrl-C:

# pidpersec.bt

just like that. live your life, then Ctrl-C when you're done. 😌

✨ FIELDS ✨

  • 1st — count of processes (it shows up after the @)

✨ OVERHEAD ✨

she traces kernel forks and keeps an in-kernel count that gets read asynchronously from user-space. and since the rate of this is generally expected to be low (<< 1000/s), the overhead is also expected to be negligible. so like, go off, it's fine. 💜

✨ SOURCE ✨

this one is from bpftrace. 🌈

https://github.com/iovisor/bpftrace

also, go look in the bpftrace distribution for a companion _examples.txt file — it's got example usage, output, and commentary for this tool. it's giving bonus content fr fr. 📖

this is a bpftrace version of the bcc tool of the same name. heads up though: the bcc tool may provide more options and customizations. 👀

https://github.com/iovisor/bcc

✨ OS ✨

Linux 🐧

✨ STABILITY ✨

Unstable - in development. 💀 she's still growing, be nice to her.

✨ AUTHOR ✨

Brendan Gregg 👑 the icon, the legend, the moment.

✨ SEE ALSO ✨

and that's the whole page, bestie 💖 this was the USER COMMANDS manual, dated 2018-09-06, for pidpersec.bt(8) — mwah, go count some forks ✨🎀🦋

📦 where this page comes from