The following is an example of the writedist.d script, Here the writedist.d script is run for a few seconds, then Ctrl-C is hit, # writedist.d dtrace: description 'sysinfo:::writech ' matched 4 probes ^C [...] Xorg value ------------- Distribution ------------- count 16 | 0 32 |@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ 169 64 |@@@ 16 128 |@@ 10 256 | 0 gnome-terminal value ------------- Distribution ------------- count 0 | 0 1 |@@ 6 2 | 0 4 | 0 8 | 1 16 |@ 2 32 |@@@ 7 64 | 0 128 |@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ 63 256 |@@@@ 10 512 | 1 1024 |@@@@@ 13 2048 |@ 2 4096 |@@@ 7 This allows us to understand the write behaviour of each process. The gnome-terminal command has executed 6 writes that returned 0 bytes, through to 7 writes that were at least 4096 bytes (up to 8192).