Troubleshooting with strace
The Tracer
© Photo by Marc Sendra Martorell on Unsplash
The strace command-line utility helps you diagnose complex problems by revealing details about the interaction between applications and the Linux kernel.
Every Linux admin or developer has encountered mysterious problems: applications crashing without clear error messages, network connections failing unexpectedly, or system resources disappearing for no apparent reason. These issues can be frustrating and time-consuming to debug – unless you have the right tools. In these situations, system tracing is often the next step, which makes strace [1] one of the most valuable tools in a Linux professional's toolkit.
Tracing in Linux allows you to observe the system calls an application makes to the kernel, revealing the hidden interactions that occur beneath the surface of your code. In this article, I'll explore four scenarios that demonstrate how to get to the source of a problem with strace.
System Calls and Tracing
When a program executes, it frequently requests services from the kernel – those services could include file operations, network access, memory allocation, or any of the other services the kernel provides. These requests are made through system calls (syscalls). System calls are the interface between user applications and the kernel.
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