1 The following is an example of the shortlived.d program. 2 It can measure time spent processing short lived processes, 3 that may be responsible for heavy load on the system but 4 are usually difficult to see with sampling tools like prstat. 5 6 7 8 Here we run in for a few seconds on a server, 9 10 # shortlived.d 11 Tracing... Hit Ctrl-C to stop. 12 ^C 13 short lived processes: 0.456 secs 14 total sample duration: 9.352 secs 15 16 Total time by process name, 17 date 12 ms 18 df 20 ms 19 ls 40 ms 20 perl 380 ms 21 22 Total time by PPID, 23 3279 452 ms 24 25 In the above output, around 5% of the CPU was lost to short 26 lived processes - mostly perl. This may be many perl processes, 27 here we are aggregating on the process name not the instance. 28 29 30 31 Now shortlived.d is run on a server with a performance problem, 32 33 # uptime 34 10:58pm up 5 day(s), 1:28, 1 user, load average: 2.20, 1.81, 1.04 35 # 36 # shortlived.d 37 Tracing... Hit Ctrl-C to stop. 38 ^C 39 short lived processes: 4.546 secs 40 total sample duration: 9.858 secs 41 42 Total time by process name, 43 expr 4122 ms 44 45 Total time by PPID, 46 3279 4122 ms 47 # 48 # ps -p 3279 49 PID TTY TIME CMD 50 3279 pts/10 0:45 report.sh 51 52 shortlived.d showed that 50% of the CPU was consumed by short lived 53 processes, all of them the "expr" command, and all having the 54 parent proccess-ID 3279. We finished by checking PID 3279 to find 55 it is a Bourne shell script called "report.sh". 56 57 58
Indexes created Mon Apr 20 00:23:12 UTC 2026