proctrace is a high level profiler for process lifecycle events such as fork, exec, setpgid, and setsid.

This was created as a debugging tool for work on Flox. Under the hood it uses bpftrace to trace kernel-level events and system calls. This means that it only works on Linux (but not on NixOS yet).

macOS support is planned but is on hold until a firmware/OS bug is fixed that causes macOS to hang if DTrace is run in the incredibly uncommon case that your machine has gone to sleep since boot. See this thread for details.

See the documentation for more details.

gantt
    title Process Trace
    dateFormat x
    axisFormat %S.%L
    todayMarker off

    section flox execs
    flox activate -- curl -X GET http://example.com :active, 0, 34ms
    <store>/bash /home/zmitchell/code/proctrace/.flox/run/aarch64-linux.proctrace/activate -c curl -X GET http://example.com :active, 34, 16ms
    /bin/bash --noprofile --rcfile /home/zmitchell/code/proctrace/.flox/run/aarch64-linux.proctrace/activate.d/bash -c curl -X GET http://example.com :active, 51, 1ms
    curl -X GET http://example.com :active, 51, 58ms
    section other
    flox-watchdog :active, 33, 84ms

Licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0, (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.