Effectiveness of Tracing in a Multicore Environment: A performance evaluation of LTTng's Kernel Space and User Space Trace primitives

Debugging in real time is imperative for telecommunication networks with their ever increasing size and complexity. In event of an error or an unexpected crash, debugging the complex systems that controls these networks becomes an insurmountable task. With the help of tracing, it is possible to capture the snapshot of a system at any given point of time. Tracing, in essence, captures the state of the system along with the programs currently running on the system. LTTng is one such tool developed to perform tracing in both kernel space and user space of an application. In this book, we evaluate the effectiveness of LTTng and its impact on the performance on the applications traced by it and have formulated a comprehensive load matrix to simulate varying load demands in a telecommunication network. We have also devised a detailed experimental methodology which encompasses a collection of test suites used to determine the efficiency of various LTTng trace primitives, particularly Kernel and User Trace primitives.