How can I see what applications are making my shell commands slow?
Recently I had noticed that some shell commands on my laptop were executing surprisingly slow.
Like most things in the tech world, it was due to a piece of jamf software locking up anything that was being read.
I managed to validate this assumption using the command fs_usage which requires sudo. Here’s an example of it in action.
> sudo fs_usage | grep zshrc
Password:
16:19:22 open /Users/marcus/dotfiles/zsh/zshrc.md 0.000021 lugh
16:19:22 open /Users/marcus/dotfiles/zsh/.zshrc 0.000137 lugh
16:19:22 WrData[A] /Users/marcus/dotfiles/zsh/.zshrc 0.000324 W lugh
16:19:22 lstat64 /System/Volumes/Data/Users/marcus/dotfiles/zsh/.zshrc 0.000015 fseventsd
16:19:22 lstat64 dotfiles/zsh/.zshrc 0.000005 perl5.28
16:19:22 lstat64 .zshrc 0.000007 perl5.28
16:19:22 lstat64 .zshrc 0.000004 perl5.28
16:19:22 readlink .zshrc 0.000004 perl5.28
16:19:22 stat64 dotfiles/zsh/.zshrc/.stow 0.000002 perl5.28
16:19:22 stat64 dotfiles/zsh/.zshrc/.nonstow 0.000001 perl5.28
16:19:22 stat64 dotfiles/zsh/.zshrc 0.000004 perl5.28
16:19:22 fsgetpath /Users/marcus/dotfiles/zsh/.zshrc 0.000005 Finder
16:19:22 getattrlist /Users/marcus/dotfiles/zsh/.zshrc 0.000014 Finder
16:19:22 fsgetpath /Users/marcus/dotfiles/zsh/.zshrc 0.000005 Finder
16:19:22 fsgetpath /Users/marcus/dotfiles/zsh/zshrc.md 0.000005 Finder
16:19:22 getattrlist /Users/marcus/dotfiles/zsh/zshrc.md 0.000012 Finder
16:19:22 fsgetpath /Users/marcus/.zshrc 0.000005 Finder
16:19:22 getattrlist /Users/marcus/.zshrc 0.000015 Finder
16:19:22 fsgetpath /Users/marcus/zshrc.md 0.000005 Finder
16:19:22 getattrlist /Users/marcus/zshrc.md 0.000014 Finder
16:19:22 fsgetpath /Users/marcus/zshrc.md 0.000003 Finder
16:19:22 getxattr dotfiles/zsh/zshrc.md 0.000014 Finder
16:19:22 fsgetpath /Users/marcus/zshrc.md 0.000004 Finder
16:19:22 fsgetpath /Users/marcus/zshrc.md 0.000003 Finder
16:19:23 lstat64 /System/Volumes/Data/Users/marcus/dotfiles/zsh/.zshrc 0.000005 fseventsd
Now this output doesn’t actually come from my work computer so you won’t see the mentioned JamfAgent but we can walk through this anyway.
First is lugh, a custom and possibly temporary literate markdown tool I use on my dotfiles. Next is perl, in the form of GNU Stow followed by macOS Finder doing some things. This gives a really nice breakdown of what is going on.
You can even use it to better understand applications, like if you run git status and see all the files that were touched within the .git folder.
I actually spotted that Yet Another Daemon was touching some of my .git files on my work laptop too. Shoo!