quickstack2 is a tool to take call stack traces with minimal overheads.

There are a couple of tools for take stack traces such as gdb, pstack, but these tools have serious overheads. In many cases, target process stops for 0.2-N seconds. It is dangerous to use such tools in production environment. quickstack makes it possible to take stack traces in less than one millisecond. This is much smaller overhead so you can frequently take stack traces in production environment.

quickstack internally scans stack frames and guesses caller functions. For 64bit applications, it is highly recommended to build with -fno-omit-frame-pointer.

quickstack2, as the name implies, is based on quickstack and contains some additional command line options, performance improvements (it can start and finish in about 50 milliseconds, while quickstack is closer to 300 milliseconds), and support for ARM64. Some of the defaults (notably for printing function line numbers) are different, but the main ptrace-based approach is the same.

• Install binutils 2.22+ and elfutils-libelf-devel
• Install cmake
• cmake .
• make
• make install

Install dependencies (Ubuntu): sudo apt-get install binutils-dev sudo apt-get install libelf-dev sudo apt-get install libiberty-dev

[user$] quickstack2 -f -p $(pidof mysqld)

BSD 3-Clause License