Tip 13: Keep It Simple

And stable. It’s possible to write long and complex DTrace scripts, especially when navigating the thousands of available probes from the fbt and pid providers. An example of this is the fbt-based tcpsnoop.d, shown and explained in Chapter 6, Network Lower-Level Protocols. Although you can write scripts like this, try to solve your tracing needs with short and simple scripts instead.

Long scripts become difficult to maintain. And if they use unstable providers such as fbt and pid, they will need maintenance to match changes in the target software. Always check for the availability of stable providers first, because more are being written each year.