brendangregg/perf-tools

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

10460 stars · 1668 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

A collection of shell-based Linux performance analysis tools built on ftrace and perf_events, created by Brendan Gregg. Each tool does one thing well, such as tracing disk I/O, syscalls, kernel functions, and TCP retransmits, with minimal dependencies.

Use cases

• trace disk I/O latency on a Linux server
• find which processes are calling exec or open syscalls
• summarize disk I/O latency as a histogram
• count or trace kernel function calls
• show TCP retransmits with address details
• profile page cache hit and miss statistics
• trace slow kernel functions above a threshold

When to choose

• you need lightweight, dependency-free tracing on Linux 3.2+ kernels
• you want quick one-off performance diagnostics without installing BPF tooling
• you are on older kernels where modern BCC/bpftrace is unavailable

When to avoid

• you need actively developed tooling with modern kernel feature support
• you want BPF-based observability with richer programmatic tracing
• you need supported, production-grade tooling rather than in-development scripts with caveats

Facets

cli-tool · maturity maintenance

monitoring tracing developer-tools performance operating-systems developer-tools cli perf-events ftrace system-tracing observability shell-scripts kernel-tracing command-line linux

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="brendangregg/perf-tools")