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Dtrace Review

GoogleTalksArchive · 19K views · 2012-08-22 · 1:18:03

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Overview

Bryan Cantrill's 2007 Google Tech Talk on DTrace, showing how dynamic tracing improves debugging of both development and live production systems. It includes a vivid war story about tracking down a problem on a Sun Ray server.

On Hacker News

HN regards it as a gem of a technical talk that tackles a fundamental debugging problem and shows a new technology solving it.

Recommended by 4 HN people across 4 months · HN mentions 2013–2026

Topics

Testing, debugging & developer toolsOperating systems & kernelsCloud, DevOps & reliability
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dtracedebuggingobservabilitysolarisbryan cantrill

What people said

mwcampbell · 2016-10 · Strong recommendation

A few of Bryan Cantrill's talks have already been mentioned here, but this one about DTrace, from 2007, is a gem: [VIDEO] I especially like the part in the middle where he tells the story of how a an awful GNOME applet was killing a Sun Ray server, and how he tracked down the culprit with DTrace.

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chubot · 2013-05 · Strong recommendation

Do you mean you prefer Linux over Windows? If so, then watch this talk: [VIDEO] Now you will prefer Solaris/BSD to Linux :)

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dmit · 2013-04 · Strong recommendation

I'm partial to Bryan Cantrill's Dtrace talk since it tackles a fundamental problem in software engineering and shows how to solve it using a new technology. The talk is more than 5 years old now, but sadly still as relevant as ever. [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by GoogleTalksArchive, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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