Bustle draws sequence diagrams of D-Bus activity, showing signal emissions, method calls and their corresponding returns, with timestamps for each individual event and the duration of each method call. This can help you check for unwanted D-Bus traffic, and pinpoint why your D-Bus-based application isn’t performing as well as you like. It also provides statistics like signal frequencies and average method call times.

Using Bustle

Run it:

bustle

Now click File → New… to start recording session bus traffic. When you’re done, click Stop, and explore the log.

If you want to record traffic without running the UI (maybe on an embedded platform which doesn’t have Gtk+ and/or a Haskell compiler), you can use the stand-alone logger:

bustle-pcap logfile.bustle

You can then open logfile.bustle in Bustle.

You can also get some ASCII-art version of the statistics shown in the UI:

bustle --count logfile.bustle
bustle --time logfile.bustle

If you want to log all system bus traffic, you need to edit /etc/dbus/system.conf to enable eavesdropping, and then remove the include of /etc/dbus-1/system.conf.d which seems to re-enable strictness. Then you can run the stand-alone logger against the system bus:

bustle-pcap --system system-log.bustle

Please remember to undo these changes when you’re done.

More information

See http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/Bustle/.