USENIX LISA 2010: Visualizations for Performance Analysis
My USENIX LISA talk from 2010 is now available on youtube, also embedded below. The title is Visualizations for Performance Analysis (and more), and showed how the full distribution of data could be presented as a heat map. This is especially useful for latency analysis, as fast-path and slow-path differences can be studied, as well [...]
Read more...In: performance, slides, video, visualizations
Surge 2012: Real-time in the real world
In September, I attended and spoke at the Surge’12 conference in Baltimore. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in performance. The theme with most talks was problems encountered at scale – and as is often the case – you can learn more from failure than success. Bryan and I gave a talk titled “Real-time [...]
Read more...In: DTrace, performance, slides, video
illumos and ZFS days
Back in October I was pleased to attend — and my employer, Delphix, was pleased to sponsor — illumos day and ZFS day, run concurrently with Oracle Open World. Inspired by the success of dtrace.conf(12) in the Spring, the goal was to assemble developers, practitioners, and users of ZFS and illumos-derived distributions to educate, share [...]
Read more...In: HSP, illumos, OpenSolaris, OracleSolaris, talk, ZFS
DTracing in Anger
My Macbook has becomeso sluggish that it feels like I’m typing ove a 9600 baud modem aagn. Or 2400. It’s alo droping keystokes – which is irritatng as hll – so please forgive theapparent tyos and mistakes. It comes and goes each minute, so thiswhole post isn’t too bad. Usually I cn see what’s wrng [...]
Read more...In: DTrace, macosx, performance
ZFS trivia: metaslabs and growing vdevs
Lately, I’ve been rooting around in the bowels of ZFS as we’ve explored some long-standing performance pathologies. To that end I’ve been fortunate to learn at the feet of Matt Ahrens who was half of the ZFS founding team and George Wilson who has forgotten more about ZFS than most people will ever know. I wanted to [...]
Read more...In: GeorgeWilson, MattAhrens, metaslab, spacemap, ZFS
Active Benchmarking
Benchmarking is often done badly: tools are run ad-hoc, without understanding what they are testing or checking that the results are valid. This can lead to poor architectural choices that haunt you later on. I previously summarized this situation as: casual benchmarking: you benchmark A, but actually measure B, and conclude you’ve measured C. In [...]
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illumos hackathon 2012: user-land types for DTrace
At the illumos hackathon last week, Robert Mustacchi and I prototyped better support for manipulating user-land structures. As anyone who’s used it knows, DTrace is currently very kernel-centric — this both reflects the reality of how operating systems and DTrace are constructed, and the origins of DTrace itself in the Solaris Kernel Group. Discussions at [...]
Read more...In: DTrace, hackathon, illumos, pid, user-land
A systems software double-header: Surge and GOTO
I recently returned from a systems software double-header, presenting at two of the industry’s best conferences: Surge in Baltimore and GOTO in Aarhus, Denmark. These conferences have much in common: they are both expertly run; they both seek out top technical content; they both attract top technologists; and (it must be said) they both take [...]
Read more...Upcoming Talk
Next Tuesday, October 2nd I’ll be talking at ZFS Day on how Joyent deploys its cloud services on top of ZFS. One of the main design principles of ZFS is merging the management of physical volumes with individual filesystems. Instead of relying on an underlying volume manager, ZFS manages disks directly and aggregates them into [...]
Read more...Upcoming Talks
I have a busy few days coming up: On Friday, September 28th, I’m speaking at Surge’12 in Baltimore with Bryan Cantrill on The Real-Time Web in the Real World: DIRT in Production. On Monday, October 1st, I’ll speak at illumos day on DTracing the Cloud, in San Francisco. On Tuesday, October 2nd, at the same [...]
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