[odaymansour]

I've identified a memory bandwidth issue in the past by keeping an eye on truss/strace output and "counting" mem operations.

After that, I compiled and ran a tiny executable called Stream[1] and got the numbers I needed in order to explain why one machine was twice as slow as another.

[1] http://www.cs.virginia.edu/stream/

[brendangregg]

Using truss/strace to figure out memory bandwidth issues sounds pretty unreliable. I would not have guessed there was much correlation between memory syscalls that truss/strace can observe (mmap/munmap, brk), and the CPU load/stores that consume memory bandwidth.