strace is a useful Linux utility for watching the system calls that a program makes. I usuall don’t have to dig this deeply into an application to debug it, but I’m running int a problem with one application, and the developer recommended doing an strace to see if anything looks suspicious. Here’s the command I’m using:
strace -Fft -o /var/tmp/strace.out -p <PID>
This command has a couple useful options. the “Ff” makes the strace follow program forks. The “-t” makes it print a human readable timestamp before each line. The “-o” argument dumps the output to the specified file, and the -p argument attaches it to a specific process.
The output is fairly cryptic, but I’m hoping that it catches something useful