Summary
Applications that are crashing, hanging or displaying anomalous behaviors are a critical issue for any software user. Few people will have the resources and skill set to debug the application directly using a source code debugger. In many cases, source code debugging may not even be an option. This article discussed a variety of options open to a Solaris OE user to narrow down the causes and scope of a application failure, including truss, proc tools, and special features of the Solaris OE runtime linker. Recommendations were also made on how to proceed with debugging application problems.
Author's Bio: Chris Duncan
Chris Duncan is currently a Software Engineer in the High End Services group at Sun Microsystems. Chris spends the majority of his time at Sun providing support to Sun's High Performance Computing (HPC) customers. His HPC experience extends more than 10 years, and includes application development, tuning, testing, and supporting HPC software on a variety of architectures and environments.