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An article for ACMQ, also published by CACM , on Visualizing System latency using latency heat maps (2010). This includes interesting latency heat maps I had found using Sun Storage Analytics, including the Rainbow Pterodactyl and the Icy Lake . This was pioneering work, and it took several years for latency heat maps to appear in other performance analysis products.
Posts showing new (and interesting) performance visualizations using Sun Storage Analytics, especially latency heat maps: Latency Art: Rainbow Pterodactyl , Heat Map Analytics , Latency Art: X marks the spot (2009).
Visualizing DRAM Latency using latency heat maps from Sun Storage Analytics (2009).
Demonstrating the Kstat/DTrace-based Analytics tool from the Sun Storage 7000 product: JBOD Analytics Example , Networking Analytics Example , NFS Analytics example (2008-9).
Posts demonstrating the performance limits of the Sun Storage 7000 series of ZFS-based storage appliance I was working on, as well as our Analytics observability tool: A quarter million NFS IOPS , Up to 2 Gbytes/sec NFS , 1 Gbyte/sec NFS, streaming from disk , My Sun Storage 7410 perf limits , CIFS at 1 Gbyte/sec , My Sun Storage 7310 perf limits , Hybrid Storage Pool: Top Speeds (2008-9).
Slides for Fishworks Overview (PDF) at CEC2008 with Cindi McGuire, where we introduced the first ZFS-based storage appliance, the Sun Storage 7000 series. Fishworks was the team that developed it. We worked at a private site, setup to mimic a San Francisco startup.
The original ZFS L2ARC post (2008) and later L2ARC Screenshots (2009). Since code changes were public each night, my block comment in usr/src/uts/common/fs/zfs/arc.c (added in Nov 2007) disguised the then-secret intent of this technology by listing "short-stroked disks" as the first intended device, instead of SSDs.
I wrote the original Sun ZFS Storage 7000 admin guide and online help, and while doing so created the most advanced content system within Sun Microsystems: A content wiki that could auto-generate Sun-styled PDFs and other formats, allowing versions to be built in seconds instead of the usual 2-week process. This 2010 version has many updates from other staff (I've yet to find my original 2008 PDF) (2008).
Slides for the OSCON 2007 talk Observability Matters: How DTrace Helped Twitter by Adam Leventhal and myself. At the time, Twitter was a one-year old startup running on Solaris with crippling performance issues, and Sun's top engineering team (including Adam and myself) visited the SF headquarters to help. This summaries findings by the team (2007).
My Solaris 10 Zones page from 2005, where I developed models for configuring Zones with Resource Controls. This was pioneering work for the performance isolation of containers (nowadays the realm of Linux cgroups). I was not a Sun employee at the time. Sun later based their official docs on my work, without attribution (they were not allowed to include my home page URL in the official Sun references).
My old and unmaintained Unix and Sun Solaris material is labeled as being in my Crypt , and kept online for historical interest only. The Crypt containers a few extra things not listed above. (circa 2003-2005.)
Last updated: 20-Sep-2021 Created: 2001 About this site, and email address: here Copyright 2021 Brendan Gregg, all rights reserved