Back in June of last year, I suggested that the Evolution client might be an interesting candidate for DTracing. DTrace, for those who are unaware, is a tool within Solaris 10 (also being ported to FreeBSD, last I heard) that allows for sophisticated in flight telemetry and monitoring on running applications. Sounds sort of systems managementish, I know – and if you’re not like my colleagues but more like me, that may glaze your eyes over a bit. But try and stay with me, because it’s actually pretty cool technology – every Solaris 10 customer I’ve spoken with personally has agreed.
I suggested applying it to Evolution because they were having memory usage issues, which is one of the things DTrace is designed to reveal. Well, soon after Sun’s Bryan Cantrill took the time to DTrace GNOME proper, with some interesting results.
After today’s Next Generation Client platform panel at EclipseCon, in which a member of the audience questioned the performance of browsers, I’m wondering whether there might not be a similar opportunity to DTrace Firefox. On this Digg thread there’s a lot of chatter about memory leaks in version 1.5, and it might be interesting to see what DTrace can see. Bryan suggested that this library might be beneficial as well.
I don’t know the folks at Mozilla well, though I could get to them indirectly through several channels, but I figured it might be an opportunity for some enterprising DTrace wizard out there to help out the Firefox team (assuming, of course, that they let you).
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