Stackvis is a JavaScript library for visualizing call stacks. For an example of the kind of data we're talking about, see:
http://www.cs.brown.edu/~dap/redis-flamegraph.svg
This library is based heavily on Brendan Gregg's FlameGraph tools.
This module provides "stackcollapse", and "flamegraph", which are essentially direct ports of the original FlameGraph tools. You can use them by first collecting data:
# dtrace -o dtrace.out -n 'profile-97{ @[ustack()] = count(); }' \
-n 'tick-30s{ exit(0); }'
then collapse common stacks:
# stackcollapse < dtrace.out > collapsed.out
then create a flame graph:
# flamegraph < collapsed.out > graph.svg
See the above link for an example.
The command-line tools are thin wrappers around the API, which is built upon a simple internal representation of stack traces and a bunch of Readers (lib/input-*.json) and Writers (lib/output-*.json) for various intermediate formats:
- input-dtrace.js: reads stacks from the output of a DTrace profiling script
- input-collapsed.js: reads data in the form used by the "stackcollapse" tool, where function offsets are stripped out, common stacks are collapsed, and there's one stack per line.
- output-collapsed.js: writes stacks in above "collapsed" form
- output-flamegraph-svg.js: writes stacks as a flame graph SVG
Client code shouldn't load these directly. Instead, require 'stackvis' and use lookupReader and lookupWriter:
var mod_stackvis = require('stackvis');
var dtrace_reader = mod_stackvis.lookupReader('dtrace')
var collapsed_writer = mod_stackvis.lookupWriter('collapsed');
The main operation is translating from one representation to another (e.g., DTrace output to a flame graph) using pipeStacks() (which requires a Bunyan logger):
var mod_bunyan = require('bunyan');
var log = new mod_bunyan({ 'name': 'mytool', 'stream': process.stderr });
mod_stackvis.pipeStacks(log, process.stdin, dtrace_reader, collapsed_writer,
process.stdout, function () { console.error('translation finished'); });
This example instantiates a new dtrace_reader to read DTrace output from process.stdin and then emits the result in collapsed form to process.stdout through the collapsed_writer.
It's easy to add new readers (for new input sources) and writers (for new types of visualizations). See lib/stackvis.js for an overview of how these interfaces work.
- See about dealing with multiple "silos" of a single flame graph that are essentially the same, but differ in exactly one frame.
- Experiment with flame graph coloring. Current options include random, gradient, and time-based. Another possibility is to use hue to denote the module and saturation to denote the size of a frame relative to others at the same level of depth.
- Experiment with more interactive visualizations, like http://bl.ocks.org/1005873