quickstack is a tool to take call stack traces with minimal overheads. There are a couple of tools to take stack traces such as gdb, pstack, but these tools have serious overheads. In many cases, target process stops for 0.2-N seconds. So it is dangerous to use such tools in production environment. quickstack makes it possible to take stack traces in less than 1 milliseconds. This is much smaller overhead so you can frequently take stack traces in production environment. quickstack internally scans stack frames and guesses caller functions. For 64bit applications, it is highly recommended to build with -fno-omit-frame-pointer. How to build: * Install binutils 2.22+ and elfutils-libelf-devel * Install cmake * cmake . * make * make install Install dependencies (Ubuntu): sudo apt-get install binutils-dev sudo apt-get install elfutils-dev sudo apt-get install libiberty-dev Example: [user$] quickstack -p `pidof mysqld`