Collectl

Collectl is rather well described at http://collectl.sourceforge.net. I have only just started playing with it, but it does seem worth looking at.

First question: where do you download it? Nothing at that collectl page will tell you.. you are supposed to just "know" from the SourceForge logo there that you'd go to http://sourceforge.net/projects/collectl to actually get it. Ahh, Linux geeks: don't you just love 'em?

Oh well: I suppose when you live and breath SourceForge it's easy to imagine that everyone must understand that sort of thing. At least the tool itself is packaged as an rpm so you don't have to be particularly geekish to take it for a spin. I downloaded it and installed it on an older 2.4 kernel system I have here - no complaints at all, and worked as advertised (not that I've had time to try every switch yet).

My very first question (after "where do I download it") was "What about sar?". That's covered in the FAQ as the very first question also - how nice for me. One of its major points is that it can plot data.. that's useful.

Worth a peek at least..

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Tue Oct 2 22:34:05 2007: Subject:   anonymous


It's kind of ironic that in a post where you poke fun at the geek mindset of not explaining things that you don't tell us what this thing is or why we might want to look further ourselves. :-)



Tue Oct 2 22:37:46 2007: Subject:   TonyLawrence


Why should I be different?

:-)

It's a performance analyzer/kernel data collection tool. See the FAQ link above..



Thu Oct 4 21:49:29 2007: Subject:   MarkSeger


Actually I'm the geek who wrote collectl and thank you for pointing out that I don't have a link on the description page for downloading. I do now! 8-)

By all means try it out and let me know what you think as I'm always trying to make it better.



Wed Oct 24 17:12:53 2007: Subject: Website updated   MarkSeger


I just wanted to let you know the website has undergone a major rewrite and hopefully makes things much clearer than they were before. I even added an entry to the FAQ that tells you where collectl got its name.
-mark



Wed Jan 16 14:00:38 2008: Subject: Latest release   anonymous
http://collectl.sourceforge.net/

Just thought I'd mention that I've released a couple of versions since my last posting and this latest version supports both the new slab allocator as well as process I/O stats, but keep in mind you'll need a kernel somewhere around 2.6.22.
-mark



Wed Jan 16 22:06:58 2008: Subject:   TonyLawrence


Good to know, thanks!



Sat Mar 14 12:14:50 2009: Subject: It'b been a loooong time   MarkSeger


I noticed it's been over a year since I last replied to this note and just thought I'd mention collectl is still alive and doing very well. It's now part of the Fedora 10 disto and gradually showing up elsewhere as well. The documentation and features keep growing too.

Just curious if you still find it useful and what are your likes/dislikes as I'm always looking to make it better.

As a couple of teasers - you can now look at top processes sorted by I/O, top slabs, and even see the distribution of interrupts by CPU. I especially like that last one because if you have an older NIC you can see all the interrupts going to one cpu whereare more modern ones distribute them across mulitple CPUs. In the former case you could get an overall modest CPU load when in fact one of them is running flat out processing the interrupts.

The latest version added support for displaying memory fragmentation from /proc/buddyinfo as well as showing ALL nfs stats including V4.

-mark

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Sat Mar 14 12:22:11 2009: Subject:   TonyLawrence


Thanks for reminding us. I hadn't gone back to see what's new but certainly will now.



Sun Nov 1 13:18:47 2009: Subject: don't miss collectl-utils   MarkSeger


Just thought you might like to know last month I released http://collectl-utils.sourceforge.net, which now add graphics/plotting capabilities to collectl. Rather than me ramble on, check it out on sourceforge.
-mark

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