Less known Solaris features: ptime
Long time readers of my blog know that i’m preferring prstat
over top
at any time. The micro state accounting in prstat gives you a much deeper insight. Using a tool not capable to use microstate accounting is like looking a video in 240p instead of 4k ultra hd (to stay at this: dtrace is like 8k ;) ). prstat is doing a really useful job in telling you what’s happening at the moment in a processes.
However sometimes it’s interesting to know, what happened in the past since the startup of the process. And there is a tool that is doing this. With ptimes -m
you can lookup the information of the micro state accounting since the creation of the process:
I’m using the tool quite often to get snapshots of the values for a process, writing it to a file and calculating the differences let’s say over multiple hours. For this task it’s much more practical than using prstat. A description of the values is in the man page, however it’s pretty much the same as in prstat -m