Hardware Resources

Hardware Requirements

Please see the Specifications section for details on the hardware and software prerequisites for Kernel Trace.

CPU

As a general rule, Kernel Trace is not CPU bound, unless the machine on which it is running is already CPU bound.

The Kernel Trace driver is called each time any SES tracepoint is invoked.  This happens constantly during normal use of the operating system.  When tracing is dormant (i.e., tracing is not occurring), these invocations immediately return with no additional processing.  This means that there is some slight CPU utilization increase when Kernel Trace is installed.  However, this overhead is minimal and is not noticeable.

During tracing, there is an additional impact on CPU utilization due to the copying of data to the trace file.

RAM

The KTRACE.SYS driver consumes 193KB of RAM when dormant, and up to 470KB of RAM when tracing.  This memory is resident (not swappable) but will not grow larger than 470KB.

The KTRACE.EXE program consumes approximately 0.4MB of RAM.

Disk Space

While the size of the Kernel Trace product itself is under 1MB (the user manual is the vast majority of this space), the resulting traces can grow as large as available disk space will allow.  Once tracing is started, the trace filename cannot be changed.  If the disk space is too small to allow KTRACE to continue tracing, then an error will occur and tracing will end.

It is important to specify a maximum trace file size when tracing is started (8MB by default).  This will ensure that the tracing goals are accomplished without hindering the operation of a production system by filling its disk.  A practical limitation on trace file size would be the capabilities of the analysis tool used to read the KTRACE file.  Please see the command syntax section for details on how to specify a maximum trace file size.


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