Brendan Gregg’s talk at ZFS Day (an event I also organized and ran).
The performance of the file system, or disks, is often the target of blame, especially in multi-tenant cloud environments. At Joyent we deploy a public cloud on ZFS-based systems, and frequently investigate performance with a wide variety of applications in growing environments. This talk is about ZFS performance observability, showing the tools and approaches we use to quickly show what ZFS is doing. This includes observing ZFS I/O throttling, an enhancement added to illumos-ZFS to isolate performance between neighbouring tenants, and the use of DTrace and heat maps to examine latency distributions and locate outliers.
