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I'm now investigating a prod issue and would expect my investigating wouldn't cause any side effect to the normal prod environment, so Would it result in the pause of the running program even for a short period? Thanks

whossa
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  • I disagree with closing this question. It is not ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and it has been reasonably answered in its current form. – jlliagre Apr 30 '12 at 20:09
  • Indeed, the question is _not_ ambiguous nor vague. There are precedents where Solaris `p`-commands have caused high system impact in the past, like http://wesunsolve.net/bugid/id/6801244 and there are still situations where these commands cause "observation impact". It's not unreasonable to ask about the implementation details and their associated side effects. – FrankH. May 09 '12 at 11:30

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pmap is adding a transient thread to the target process and analyzing it in real time without interrupting it so there should be no risk using it.

pstack, pfiles and pldd are stopping the target process while inspecting them. Usually, this has no consequences as being stopped for a short period of time is something to be expected by any process in a time sharing system like Unix. However, in rare situations, stopping the affected process might be longer than expected and thus have unwanted side effects. This is explained in the p commands manual pages in the WARNING section.

With all the p commands, using the -F flag is not recommended in a production environment as chaos might occur.

jlliagre
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