The sequence of things that happen in the execution of a program.
Overhead
- CPU trace tools introduce a 20x slowdown
- Timestamps at function calls introduce a 1.2-1.5x slowdown
- Timestamp of SYS CALLS introduce < 1% slowdown
- Valgrind: 100x slowdown since it checks every memory read and write for validity
- Disk tracing is pretty minimal
- The trace itself also takes up space, we need to be a bit careful about what we include in our trace information.