trace

This command captures a sequential flow of time-stamped system events. The trace is a valuable tool for observing system and application execution.

While many of the other tools provide general statistics such as CPU and I/O utilization, the trace facility provides more detailed information. For example, you can find out:

Where an event occurred in the code.
Which process caused an event to occur.
When an event took place.
How an event is affecting the system.

The curt postprocessing tool can extract information from the trace. It provides statistics on CPU utilization and process and thread activity. Another postprocessing tool is splat, the Simple Performance Lock Analysis Tool. This tool can be used to analyze simple locks in the AIX® kernel and kernel extensions.