health-check revisited

Earlier this month I wrote about health-check, a tool to sanity check application resource usage.  Since then I've re-worked and simplified the system call tracing and added some new features.

Originally, health-check was designed to attach itself to running processes. To make the tool even easier to use it can now start applications and follow any subsequent new processes spawned off from fork() or clone(). For example:

sudo health-check -u joeuser -f thunderbird

..will start thunderbird (running as user "joeuser") and follow any new processes it creates.

Sometimes applications will force flushing of data or metadata to disk by excessive use of fsync(), fdatasync() and sync().  Health-check will now keep track of these system calls and provide feedback on their use.

Health-check already has some memory checking techniques - however, it now has been extended to check explicitly for heap changes by examining the brk() system call and also keeping track of mmap() and munmap() mappings.  This allows better tracking of potential memory leaks.

Source code can be found at: git://kernel.ubuntu.com/cking/health-check

Packages found in my White PPA in ppa:colin-king/white so to install on Ubuntu systems use:

 sudo add-apt-repository ppa:colin-king/white  
 sudo apt-get update  
 sudo apt-get install health-check