A few (extremely busy) weeks ago, Brendan Gregg wrote a blog post very different from his usual technical treatises: it was about me. And it’s probably the most romantic thing anyone has ever done for me.
It’s taken me a while to come up with an adequate response – I have been, most uncharacteristically, struck dumb.
“If you have someone that you think is The One, don’t just think… ‘Okay, let’s make a date. Let’s plan this and make a party and get married.’ Take that person and travel around the world… go to places that are hard to go to and hard to get out of. And if when you come back… you’re still in love with that person, get married at the airport.”
At USENIX LISA`13, Brendan Gregg led a Metrics Workshop, along with Narayan Desai, Kent Skaar, Theo Schlossnagle, and Caskey Dickson. “This was an opportunity for many industry professionals to discuss problems with performance metrics and monitoring, and to propose and discuss solutions.” More details from Brendan here.
I filmed the day, above is a playlist of all the resulting videos. Below is the gallery of photos from all of that edition of LISA, which was… eventful.
How does Linux system performance compare to other OSes, particularly the performance-focused Solaris family? What features inspired by them could be added to Linux?
Both are bristling with performance features and optimizations, and it’s difficult enough to fully understand the performance of the Linux kernel and its distributions, let alone other kernels and OSes for comparison. Brendan Gregg has unique insight into the performance features and analysis capabilities of both Linux and Solaris-based systems, which he covers in depth in his new book:Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud. He also works at Joyent, a high performance cloud provider, where OS performance is core to the business, and frequently debugs head-to-head performance comparisons. It’s not just each OS’s baseline performance that matters, but also their analysis tools, and how quickly potential customer benchmarks can be debugged and tuned. This talk will include specific areas where SmartOS – an open source illumos kernel derivative of OpenSolaris – often beats Linux performance, and vice-versa. How does Linux compare today, and what can it do next? … and what could the Solaris family learn from Linux?
In April, 2012, I organized and ran the second-ever DTrace conference (the first had been held in 2008). I found the venue and sponsors, did all the logistics, live streamed and filmed the entire day’s proceedings. It was run somewhat unconference style, with Bryan Cantrill emceeing, so the final list of talks you see below emerged over the course of the day.
Perhaps my greatest feat for this conference was persuading the Oracle DTrace for Linux team to attend and speak!
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.
