News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Unusual disk latency by sqs on Friday January 02, 2009 @04:03AM (#417229)
How much overhead does it take to record disk latency data in realtime? Does it slow down the disks? I read on the guy's blog that ZFS's write caching meant that end users didn't experience increased latency when the guy yelled at the disks, but surely there must be some performance cost to all this instrumentation.
Re:Unusual disk latency by seiji on Friday January 02, 2009 @06:47AM (#417273)
It's possible thanks to the magic of dtrace.

In a storage appliance, you wouldn't expect the load to be overwhelmingly CPU bound[1], so performing real time instrumentation isn't a noticeable performance hit: http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/DTrace_Topics...

[1]: assuming you aren't using ZFS gzip compression: http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2008/10/13/zfs-mysqlinnodb-comp...