Recently, there was a thread on an internal alias of old Sun guys. The problem at hand was to track down a process that is consuming memory on Linux. This is the type of problem that can be solved many ways (ps, top, etc…), but to my amazement someone mentioned that pmap could be used for Linux…. I guess I didn’t get the memo 
About 6 months back I wrote a few entries that discussed Solaris tools for the Linux Guy in the posts:
- Solaris Eye for the Linux guy… or how I learned to stop worrying about Linux and Love Solaris (Part 1)
- Solaris Eye for the Linux Guy… Part II (oprofile, Dtrace, and Oracle Event Trace)
These posts explored how to look at Solaris from a Linux point of view – pmap(1M) should have been added to the mix. The “pmap(1M)” command is an old Solaris command that explores the mapping of virtual memory to physical memory. I have used it for years to explore things such as how much “SGA” is allocated and what are actual memory page sizes. You can see the Heap, Stack, Shared, and Txt mappings. This can be extremely useful when investigating memory leaks and other such memory related issues. I am very happy to see that this has made it into the major Linux distributions.
Now if we can only get Dtrace, that would be very cool. I recently have been running some benchmarks on SPARC SuperCluster and was happy to use some of my old friends. Pulling out “hotuser” from the Dtrace toolkit was nice.