Sun's DTrace wins award form the Wall Street Journal

Sun's DTrace framework, part of the recently open sourced Open Solaris operating system, has won an award from the Wall Street Journal for technological breakthrough.

The DTrace system allows operators to examine what is happening within a processes as they run, a notoriously hard challenge. In the past I've used gdb the GNU debugger, and found it very frustrating.

Computer systems are notoriously finicky. They'll hum along just fine and then unaccountably slow down, freeze up or stop working altogether. Finding the cause of some unexplained problem is difficult and time-consuming, especially with complicated systems in real-life settings.

Bryan Cantrill and a team of engineers at Sun Microsystems Inc. have devised a way to diagnose misbehaving software quickly and while it's still doing its work. While traditional trouble-shooting programs can take several days of testing to locate a problem, the new technology, called DTrace, is able to track down problems quickly and relatively easily, even if the cause is buried deep in a complex computer system.

cheers, stuart