tcpsynbl.bt(8) System Manager's Manual tcpsynbl.bt(8)
NAME
tcpsynbl.bt - Show the TCP SYN backlog as a histogram. Uses bpf-
trace/eBPF.
SYNOPSIS
tcpsynbl
DESCRIPTION
This tool shows the TCP SYN backlog size during SYN arrival as a his-
togram. This lets you see how close your applications are to hitting
the backlog limit and dropping SYNs (causing performance issues with
SYN retransmits), and is a measure of workload saturation. The his-
togram shown is measured at the time of SYN received, and a separate
histogram is shown for each backlog limit.
This works by tracing the tcp_v4_syn_recv_sock() and
tcp_v6_syn_recv_sock() kernel functions using dynamic instrumentation.
Since these functions may change in future kernels, this tool may need
maintenance to keep working.
Since this uses BPF, only the root user can use this tool.
REQUIREMENTS
CONFIG_BPF and bpftrace.
EXAMPLES
Show the TCP SYN backlog as a histogram.
# tcpsynbl.bt
FIELDS
backlog
The backlog size when a SYN was received.
count The number of times this backlog size was encountered.
distribution
An ASCII visualization of the count column.
OVERHEAD
Inbound SYNs should be relatively low compared to packets and other
events, so the overhead of this tool is expected to be negligible.
SOURCE
This tool originated from the book "BPF Performance Tools", published
by Addison Wesley (2019):
http://www.brendangregg.com/bpf-performance-tools-book.html
See the book for more documentation on this tool.
This version is in the bpftrace repository:
https://github.com/iovisor/bpftrace
Also look in the bpftrace distribution for a companion _examples.txt
file containing example usage, output, and commentary for this tool.
OS
Linux
STABILITY
Unstable - in development.
AUTHOR
Brendan Gregg
SEE ALSO
tcptop(8)
USER COMMANDS 2019-07-03 tcpsynbl.bt(8)
Generated by dwww version 1.16 on Tue Dec 16 14:56:20 CET 2025.