In his post on dtrace.org Adam Leventhal summarizes the 10th anniversary celebration of the creation of ZFS. The post includes three videos on the subject, the first of which is with Matt Ahrens, co-creator of ZFS, who discusses the new stable ZFS interface designed for programmatic consumers of the solution. John Kennedy explains his work on the ZFS test suite, and Chris Siden of Delphix discusses his work on ZFS feature flags and Async Destroy, which allows datasets to be destroyed asynchronously in the background, which is especially helpful when gigantic datasets need to be erased, Leventhal observes.
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Interrupts are events delivered to CPUs, usually by external devices and can cause performance and observability problems for applications. Tim Cook's post explains the use of DTrace in identifying the source of interrupts and solving the performance problems caused when an interrupt "steals" a CPU from an application thread, halting its process while the interrupt is serviced. Cook calls this pinning (the interrupt will pin an application thread if the interrupt was delivered to a CPU on which an application was executing at the time). Cook cites several DTrace scripts to use in assessing the effects of pinning.
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"Picking a non-C locale can hurt performance – something that has been known for many years. In this case, a GNU grep(1) bug inflated the translation overhead to slow down performance by a huge degree: up to 2000x. In short: leave LANG=C; aim DTrace at everything – even grep(1)." This is the recommendation Brendan Gregg arrives at in his post "2000x performance win." He recounts his experience in testing hypotheses framed to discover performance degradation in a production SmartOS cloud environment and the code samples involved with arriving at the conclusion above.
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