NAME¶

pidpersec - Count new processes (via fork()). Uses Linux eBPF/bcc.

SYNOPSIS¶

pidpersec

DESCRIPTION¶

pidpersec shows how many new processes were created each second. There can be performance issues caused by many short-lived processes, which may not be visible in sampling tools like top(1). pidpersec provides one way to investigate this behavior.

This works by tracing the kernel sched_fork() function using dynamic tracing, and will need updating to match any changes to this function.

Since this uses BPF, only the root user can use this tool.

REQUIREMENTS¶

CONFIG_BPF and bcc.

EXAMPLES¶

Count new processes created each second:

# pidpersec

OVERHEAD¶

This traces the kernel fork function, and maintains an in-kernel count which is read asynchronously from user-space. As the rate of this is generally expected to be low (<< 1000/s), the overhead is also expected to be negligible.

SOURCE¶

This is from bcc.

https://github.com/iovisor/bcc

Also look in the bcc distribution for a companion _examples.txt file containing example usage, output, and commentary for this tool.

OS¶

Linux

STABILITY¶

Unstable - in development.

AUTHOR¶

Brendan Gregg

SEE ALSO¶

top(1)