New albums drop on Tuesdays, why not drop some nifty knowledge as well?

Today, I had the pleasure of attending an Engine Yard webinar, Debugging
Ruby Systems. In this webinar, the always sharp Aman Gupta (twitter, github), reviewed his
favorite tools for debugging ruby and rails applications.

The webinar recording isn’t yet up and even though the slides will eventually be posted,
I figured it would be worthwhile to post my notes so here they are. For my
next post, I’ll cover which tools helped me diagnose and resolve an
outstanding issue in one of our current applications. Stay tuned!

All credit for good goes to Aman. Any errors are mine. Most of these tools are linux specific. Enjoy!

h4. lsof – show open files

lsof -nPp <pid>

strace

summary mode, run it for a while and then hit ^C

strace -cp <pid></pid>

OR

system call and arguments as they are happening

strace -ttTp <pid> -o <file></file></pid>

• ruby 1.8 uses signals to schedule its green threads. process receives a SIGVTALRM signal
  every 10ms

• in summary mode, you see a lot of calls sigprocmask (ruby bug, shows up in
  linux distribution ruby because compiled w/pthread as it is spawning thread to do signaling)

tcpdump

tcpdump -i eth0 -s <len> -nqA <expr>

dumps to file, and then open file in wireshark for further analysis

tcpdump -w <file></file>

PERFTOOLS, google’s performance tools

download and compile, setup, profile and report

pprof ruby ruby.prof [--text|--gif]
gem install perftools.rb

• only interested in ruby c calls

• real time (wall time) vs. CPU time

• perftools does a good job helping you understand a code base as you can see
  the function call graph

• also has object allocation profile

ltrace

 ltrace -cp <pid> ltrace -ttTp <pid> -o <file>

• traces library calls as opposed to strace does system calls.

• joe domato – new maintainer of ltrace

• no good ltrace on os x. no good strace on mac os x. dtrace works on mac os x
  but doesn’t replicate all the functionality of strace and ltrace

gdb

 gdb <executable> gdb attach <pid>

• Two ways to use it
  1. Attach to a running process
  2. Use a coredump

• gdb.rb – gdb with MRI hooks

  gem install gdb.rb

• gdb.rb (does not work w/1.9 but work is being done on it or OS X) gdb 7 not compatible on OS X

memprof – a heap visualizer for ruby

gem install memprof

• memprof.track

  • like bleak_house, but for a given block of code

  • use memprof::Middleware in your webapps to run track per request

• memprof.dump
  • shows you details about objects created during that block. json output
• memprof.dump_all

  • dump out every single live object as json

  • one per line to specified file

  • couple hundred mb file

  • analyze via

    • jsawk/grep

    • custom ruby scripts

    • mongodb

    • …

• memprof.com – fantastic!!
  • a web-based heap visualizer and leak analyzer

rack-perftools – rack middleware for perftools.rb

gem install rack-perftools_profiler

middleware that adds urls to app that, if special params are included,
intercepts a request and returns profile info!