pidpersec.bt(8)

✨ pidpersec.bt(8) ✨ 💖 this is the manual page for pidpersec.bt, the tool that gives you the full scoop on your system's process births 🍼

✨ NAME ✨

okay so pidpersec.bt is the tool that counts new processes (via fork()) 📊 and it runs on bpftrace/eBPF 🔥

💅 SYNOPSIS 💅

pidpersec.bt

📖 DESCRIPTION 📖

bestie, pidpersec tells you how many brand new processes got spun up every single second 🦋 here's the tea: lots of short-lived processes can cause performance problems, and they can totally hide from sampling tools like top(1) 🙈 pidpersec is one way to actually catch them in the act 🕵️‍♀️

this works by tracing the tracepoint:sched:sched_process_fork tracepoint ✨

and bc this runs on BPF, only the root user can use this tool 👑 no cap, you need to be root 🫶

🎀 REQUIREMENTS 🎀

you need CONFIG_BPF and bpftrace in your corner 💜

🧚 EXAMPLES 🧚

here's how you count new processes, getting per-second summaries until you hit Ctrl-C 🌸

# pidpersec.bt

🍓 FIELDS 🍓

• 1st — the count of processes (the bit after "@") 💅

🌈 OVERHEAD 🌈

so this traces kernel forks and keeps an in-kernel count, which user-space reads asynchronously 🫧 the rate is usually expected to be pretty low (<< 1000/s), so the overhead should be negligible 😌 slay

🔥 SOURCE 🔥

this comes straight from bpftrace 💖

https://github.com/bpftrace/bpftrace

also, look in the bpftrace distribution for a companion _examples.txt file 📂 it has example usage, output, and commentary for this tool, iykyk 🤓

this is the bpftrace version of the bcc tool with the same name ✨ the bcc tool might give you more options and customizations, so check it out if you want more control 💜

https://github.com/iovisor/bcc

🦋 OS 🦋

Linux, obviously 🐧

🙈 STABILITY 🙈

Unstable — it's still in development, so don't be shocked if things shift 💀

👑 AUTHOR 👑

written by Brendan Gregg, the legend himself 🫶

💜 SEE ALSO 💜

• top(1) 👀

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bye bestie 🎀 this was the USER COMMANDS manual page for pidpersec.bt(8), last updated 2018-09-06. stay curious and keep your forks in check 🧚💖