From: Antoine
Date: Fri, 30 Sep 2016 20:37:35 +0200
Subject: hey!

Hello !

I would tell my (linux)pc to randomly "ps aux" while it does lots of stuff.
no?

byebye
antoine

PS.: or maybe "ps aux | sort -nrk 3" -> so I get the CPU activity rank.

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From: Gaxun
Date: Fri, 30 Sep 2016 13:57:53 -0500
Subject: Re: hey!

Hi! Thanks for writing.

That's a great way to check up on what's going on at any given time.  Isn't
it amazing how many things are happening at once?

I think what Knuth is asking for here is an even deeper understanding of
what happened at that moment.  Recording every instruction that the CPU
executed.  Millions of them! And then tracing those back to the source code
they came from.  So when I see that apache was running with `ps aux`, I
need to also know what machine instructions apache used in that second.
And then figure out if it did exactly the right thing.

About enough to melt your brain!

Thanks,
Gaxun

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From: Antoine
Date: Fri, 30 Sep 2016 22:12:06 +0200
Subject: Re: hey!

right! got it. some kind of wireshark output but for everything down to the
sourcecode of all what's running.

well, "ps aux" as starting point then lot's of creativity to dig out what
happens at the bottom.

interesting!

a dataset of such data evolving in time (mega lots of bigdata!), if
available, would make many data freaks superhappy (thinking of a kaggle
contest or something like that: "unravelling what your PC really does
(behind your back)")

keep going & good luck,
thank YOU!

cheers