4.3.3. Determining Time Spent in Kernel and User Space

This section illustrates how to determine the amount of time any given thread is spending in either kernel or user-space.

#! /usr/bin/env stap

probe perf.sw.cpu_clock!, timer.profile {
  // NB: To avoid contention on SMP machines, no global scalars/arrays used,
  // only contention-free statistics aggregates.
  tid=tid(); e=execname()
  if (!user_mode())
    kticks[e,tid] <<< 1
  else
    uticks[e,tid] <<< 1
  ticks <<< 1
  tids[e,tid] <<< 1
}

global uticks, kticks, ticks

global tids

probe timer.s(5), end {
  allticks = @count(ticks)
  printf ("%16s %5s %7s %7s (of %d ticks)\n",
          "comm", "tid", "%user", "%kernel", allticks)
  foreach ([e,tid] in tids- limit 20) {
    uscaled = @count(uticks[e,tid])*10000/allticks
    kscaled = @count(kticks[e,tid])*10000/allticks
    printf ("%16s %5d %3d.%02d%% %3d.%02d%%\n",
      e, tid, uscaled/100, uscaled%100, kscaled/100, kscaled%100)
  }
  printf("\n")

  delete uticks
  delete kticks
  delete ticks
  delete tids
}

thread-times.stp lists the top 20 processes currently taking up CPU time within a 5-second sample, along with the total number of CPU ticks made during the sample. The output of this script also notes the percentage of CPU time each process used, as well as whether that time was spent in kernel space or user space.

Example 4.13, “thread-times.stp Sample Output” contains a 5-second sample of the output for thread-times.stp:

  tid   %user %kernel (of 20002 ticks)
    0   0.00%  87.88%
32169   5.24%   0.03%
 9815   3.33%   0.36%
 9859   0.95%   0.00%
 3611   0.56%   0.12%
 9861   0.62%   0.01%
11106   0.37%   0.02%
32167   0.08%   0.08%
 3897   0.01%   0.08%
 3800   0.03%   0.00%
 2886   0.02%   0.00%
 3243   0.00%   0.01%
 3862   0.01%   0.00%
 3782   0.00%   0.00%
21767   0.00%   0.00%
 2522   0.00%   0.00%
 3883   0.00%   0.00%
 3775   0.00%   0.00%
 3943   0.00%   0.00%
 3873   0.00%   0.00%