At USENIX LISA 13, Brendan Gregg led a full-day, interactive workshop on metrics, with attendees from across the tech industry. Tutorial material was provided by Brendan, along with Caskey Dickson of Google and Theo Schlossnagle of OmniTI. There were also group exercises and presentations. I filmed it all, and we’ll be rolling it out to everyone soon.
At the end of the day, Brendan gave two quick summary talks on statistics and visualizations, presented here as a teaser.
Then life became busy and insane (partly because he was writing a book, but not only), and we didn’t shoot anything at all for months. And then, finally, the book was finished.
Many months after that, when the book was finally in print, we launched it at a meetup of BayLISA, where Brendan gave a long talk on all of it, with in-depth look at Chapter 6: CPUs.
The book is also available from Informitin paper, ebook, or a bundle of both!
“It’s a conversation between technologists, not between a company and a customer” – great talk @DiedreS#monktoberfest — Heather Huffman (@hhaustin) October 3, 2013
Enjoying @DeirdreS using a Hollywood metaphor for the relationship between companies and “talent” at #monktoberfest. — Justin Sheehy (@justinsheehy) October 3, 2013
“I’m not talking about taking marketing VPs and turning them into stars, I’m talking about actual talent” @DeirdreS at #monktoberfest
For over 30 years, hard drives have designated the smallest storage location as 512 bytes. In January 2011, all major hard drive manufactures began shipping their hard drive platforms using a new standard called Advanced Format. To aid in the transition, these new hard drives provide a 512 byte emulation mode that allows the drives to advertise themselves as a 512 byte addressable devices. This can severely impact write performance resulting in the need for read-modify-write operations for any misaligned or partial writes that are issued.
The problem is not limited to just physical hardware. Other storage platforms may also provide LUNs (logical unit number) that presents themselves as a 512 byte addressable devices when, in fact, they use a 4K sector size internally. Although ZFS has built-in support for 4K sectors, it has no automatic way of dealing with the lies that the storage devices tell. This talk will focus on the methods that have been developed to work around the lies that hard drive storage platforms tell and will discuss the challenges and drawbacks that come with using 4K sectors.
