System call analysis report

[Ian Clatworthy]

All,

Attached is one of the reports I'm putting together for the sprint in 
London next week. The idea is to run a 'user script' containing various 
Use Cases and to measure and report on various things: time taken, disk 
space used, system calls made, network traffic, disk io, etc. The script 
can be run on different source code trees so we can see how well we 
scale or otherwise. As we address bottlenecks over time, we can also 
check we haven't pushed the problem elsewhere - the good ol' 
whack-a-mole tuning challenge. :-)

This particular report shows data from a script that was run on the 
source code tree created using this command in the 0.16 branch:

    bzr export bzr0.16.tar.gz

The resulting tree contains 613 files. I'll have reports on much larger 
trees (e.g. 50k files) real soon.

If you have any suggestions on making this report more useful (e.g. by 
filtering the set of system calls to just the 'useful' ones), let me 
know. I'm keen to turn the vast amounts of data being collected by 
strace and other tools into information we can action.

If you see anything that looks really weird, let me know (as it may be a 
bug in the report). Getting repeatable, meaningful benchmark results 
isn't simple to say the least though my (perhaps naive) expectation is 
that system call counts ought to be reasonably repeatable over time, at 
least for the io system calls. I hope to confirm that today.

As always, all feedback welcome.

Ian C.
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