20042010 Ericsson AB. All Rights Reserved. The contents of this file are subject to the Erlang Public License, Version 1.1, (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You should have received a copy of the Erlang Public License along with this software. If not, it can be retrieved online at http://www.erlang.org/. Software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" basis, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing rights and limitations under the License. Observer Release Notes otp_appnotes nil nil nil notes.xml

This document describes the changes made to the Observer application.

Observer 0.9.8.4
Improvements and New Features

The multitrace.erl installation example file is now installed in the examples directory. (Thanks to Peter Lemenkov.)

Own Id: OTP-8857
Observer 0.9.8.3
Improvements and New Features

The test suite has been updated for R14A.

Own Id: OTP-8708
Observer 0.9.8.2
Improvements and New Features

Misc updates

Own Id: OTP-8456
Observer 0.9.8.1
Improvements and New Features

Major improvements of the Erlang distribution for Erlang runtime systems with SMP support. Previously distribution port locks were heavily contended, and all encoding and decoding for a specific distribution channel had to be done in sequence. Lock contention due to the distribution is now negligible and both encoding and decoding of Erlang messages can be done in parallel.

The old atom cache protocol used by the Erlang distribution has been dropped since it effectively prevented all parallel encoding and decoding of messages passed over the same distribution channel.

A new atom cache protocol has been introduced which isolates atom cache accesses and makes parallel encoding and decoding of messages passed over the same distribution channel possible. The new atom cache protocol also use an atom cache size 8 times larger than before. The new atom cache protocol is documented in the ERTS users guide.

Erlang messages received via the distribution are now decoded by the receiving Erlang processes without holding any distribution channel specific locks. Erlang messages and signals sent over the distribution are as before encoded by the sending Erlang process, but now without holding any distribution channel specific locks during the encoding. That is, both encoding and decoding can be and are done in parallel regardless of distribution channel used.

The part that cannot be parallelized is the atom cache updates. Atom cache updates are therefore now scheduled on the distribution port. Since it is only one entity per distribution channel doing this work there is no lock contention due to the atom cache updates.

The new runtime system does not understand the old atom cache protocol. New and old runtime systems can however still communicate, but no atom cache will be used.

Own Id: OTP-7774
Observer 0.9.8
Improvements and New Features

etop would crash if the emulator's custom allocators had been turned off (e.g. using the +Meamin option).

Own Id: OTP-7519

The copyright notices have been updated.

Own Id: OTP-7851
Observer 0.9.7.4
Improvements and New Features

Minor Makefile changes.

Own Id: OTP-6689

Obsolete guard tests (such as list()) have been replaced with the modern guard tests (such as is_list()).

Own Id: OTP-6725
Observer 0.9.7.3
Improvements and New Features

This application has been updated to eliminate warnings by Dialyzer.

Own Id: OTP-6551
Observer 0.9.7.2
Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Several minor bugs and race conditions eliminated in the runtime_tools and observer applications.

Own Id: OTP-6265
Observer 0.9.7.1
Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Crash dump with large integers could crash the crashdump_viewer.

Own Id: OTP-6301
Observer 0.9.7 (R11B)
Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

Fixed a bug in etop which made the Load and Memory information in the header incorrect -- for example the value shown for binary (memory allocated for binaries) was actually the number of currently running processes. (Thanks to Rikard Johansson.)

Own Id: OTP-6075
Observer 0.9.6.2
Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

The Observer application has been recompiled because of a compiler bug.

Own Id: OTP-5700
Observer 0.9.6.1
Fixed Bugs and Malfunctions

crashdump_viewer is faster when showing message, dictionary, and stack dump for large processes.

Own Id: OTP-5408