// the find
brendangregg/perf-tools
Performance analysis tools based on Linux perf_events (aka perf) and ftrace
Shell scripts from Brendan Gregg that wrap Linux ftrace and perf_events to give you tools like iosnoop, execsnoop, and funccount without needing to understand the raw kernel interfaces. Aimed at ops engineers and performance engineers who need to answer 'what is my system actually doing' on production Linux boxes, especially older kernels without eBPF support.
No dependencies beyond what's already on a Linux box — no language runtimes, no agent to install, just shell scripts you can wget and run. The example output files are genuinely useful: they show real command invocations with real output, not contrived demos. Man pages exist for every tool, which is rare for a collection like this. The ftrace-based tools work without debuginfo, which matters on minimal production servers where you can't add packages.
Last commit was November 2023 and development had been winding down for years before that — Gregg's own README tells you to prefer bcc/eBPF tools instead, so this is essentially a legacy collection kept for older kernels. Several tools carry real kernel panic risk on 2.6.32-era kernels and a 5x slowdown warning in extreme cases, which means you can't safely hand these to someone who doesn't read man pages first. The directory layout is a mess: scripts appear in both the repo root and a bin/ directory with no clear canonical location. awk dependency on either mawk or gawk creates subtle portability issues that can silently produce wrong output depending on what's installed.