A long time ago I suggested that you could track CPU usage, or  
dispatch clock time in
Interpreter>>transferTo: aProc  since that still is the only place a  
transfer switch occurs between processes.
You could collect more things too, like network traffic etc.
I've always thought the benefit is that you don't have some ugly high  
priority watcher task thundering about
creating garbage and leaving foot prints in the cake...


http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/2001-March/015945.html


On 3-Mar-09, at 5:31 PM, Juan Vuletich wrote:

> Hi Andreas,
>
> Andreas Raab wrote:
>> Juan Vuletich wrote:
>>> What you say sounds similar to what Andreas suggests to make  
>>> MessageTally spy over all processes. The issue I point out is that  
>>> when MessageTally
>>> builds the tree, the sender of a context might be in another  
>>> process. This happens when a context forks a new process, it is  
>>> still its sender. So when building the tally tree, I need to query  
>>> each context for the process running it, and when it is different  
>>> from the parent's one, I'll start a new tally tree.
>>
>> I'm not sure how useful this is. When it comes to measuring where  
>> the time goes, the cumulative tree of multiple processes shows you  
>> if you have deficiencies in the core framework handling. This is  
>> extremely useful. And it breaks down quite nicely into separate  
>> pieces where actual different work is involved. I don't think you  
>> would get much more useful information if you were to break things  
>> apart. And I can say for sure that for the purposes of our server  
>> profiling it would be pretty much useless - under load we run  
>> literally hundreds of processes.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>  - Andreas
>>
>>
>>
>
> I understand that for a server having an variable (and big) number  
> of processes it is not useful. But for our case, an application with  
> a small and fixed set of processes, the first question we want to  
> answer is "which is the process using all the cpu?". Please see the  
> message I just sent on this thread to see an example of what I want.
>
> Thanks,
> Juan Vuletich
>

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John M. McIntosh <johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com>
Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd.  http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com
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