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.
Brendan Gregg at illumos Day (an event I also organized and ran).
Cloud computing facilitates rapid deployment and scaling, often pushing high load at applications under continual development. DTrace allows immediate analysis of issues on live production systems even in these demanding environments – no need to restart or run a special debug kernel. For the illumos kernel, DTrace has been enhanced to support cloud computing, providing more observation capabilities to zones as used by Joyent SmartMachine customers. DTrace is also frequently used by the cloud operators to analyze systems and verify performance isolation of tenants. This talk covers DTrace in the illumos-based cloud, showing examples of real-world performance wins.
How does one go about running intensive business-intelligence (BI) database queries on rapidly changing data? We found ourselves pondering this question while helping Etsy do periodic reporting on their massive BI database. We harnessed the power of ZFS to create lightweight, yet writable, clones of production data that could be deleted when the report was done. The side effect was that we could also stand up staging environments at any time to test upgrades, schema changes and anything else that needed to be validated against real data.
A panel at ZFS Day covering the state of ZFS on Linux, FreeBSD, illumos, and more, moderated by Deirdré Straughan wih Matt Ahrens, Justin Gibbs, Will Andrews, Don Brady, Brian Behlendorf
