The following is an example of the shortlived.d program. It can measure time spent processing short lived processes, that may be responsible for heavy load on the system but are usually difficult to see with sampling tools like prstat. Here we run in for a few seconds on a server, # shortlived.d Sampling.. Hit Ctrl-C to stop. ^C short lived processes: 0.456 secs total sample duration: 9.352 secs Total time by process name, date 12 ms df 20 ms ls 40 ms perl 380 ms Total time by PPID, 3279 452 ms In the above output, around 5% of the CPU was lost to short lived processes - mostly perl. This may be many perl processes, here we are aggregating on the process name not the instance. Now shortlived.d is run on a server with a performance problem, # uptime 10:58pm up 5 day(s), 1:28, 1 user, load average: 2.20, 1.81, 1.04 # # shortlived.d Sampling.. Hit Ctrl-C to stop. ^C short lived processes: 4.546 secs total sample duration: 9.858 secs Total time by process name, expr 4122 ms Total time by PPID, 3279 4122 ms # # ps -p 3279 PID TTY TIME CMD 3279 pts/10 0:45 report.sh shortlived.d showed that 50% of the CPU was consumed by short lived processes, all of them the "expr" command, and all having the parent proccess-ID 3279. We finished by checking PID 3279 to find it is a Bourne shell script called "report.sh".