

Linux Performance - Walkman
http://www.brendangregg.com/linuxperf.html

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fasteo
I would recommend his book [1] to anyone interested in systems performance.
What really caught my attention is the focus he puts in having a goal and
applying a method to solve performance issues. Many times, I have found myself
"lost" while isolating a performance issue. Not anymore.

[1]
[http://www.brendangregg.com/sysperfbook.html](http://www.brendangregg.com/sysperfbook.html)

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nisa
I'm just a lowly student assistant that deals with a lot of Linux machines
running Hadoop but I'm totally in love with these presentations from Joyent
and the SmartOS guys.

I seriously considered moving to SmartOS as ZFS and Zones and likely Dtrace as
these features that would make my job, that largely comes down to organizing
running software on machines and debugging problems, far easier..and would
allow me to use the machines to better degree but in reality it's not going to
happen.

Nobody is familiar with Solaris userland. I'm not a sophisticated and educated
systems engineer at Joyent I'm just a stressed guy trying to fix problems.
Unfortunatly Linux is pretty good at making it work because a lot people are
in a similar situation and someone will fix it for me.

I just don't have the time and knowledge and energy to e.g. fix native Hadoop
libraries in the ecosystem to build with another libc or make my own or other
applications able to run without some Linux specific crap..

That beeing said I really thought about pushing SmartOS/Solaris but as a lone
fighter It would be suicide in a world where everyone knows apt-get install
<whatever> and get his shit done in a reasonable way..

Maybe it's something for specialised application and not academia

I've came pretty far with just strace and perf top and most problems I had in
my own application where better analyzed by valgrind and kcachegrind or massif
and the visualizer...

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adamnemecek
You might be aware of this but FreeBSD has all of those features that you
mention. The objections that you have against Solaris might still apply
though.

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nisa
Yes. I'm running ZFS on Linux and while ZFS is really great it's not really
good integrated in the kernel and sometimes pretty unstable at least in my
rather esoteric scenario... Despite other claims FreeBSD suffers similar
problems.. ([https://clusterhq.com/blog/complexity-freebsd-vfs-using-
zfs-...](https://clusterhq.com/blog/complexity-freebsd-vfs-using-zfs-example-
part-1-2/)). Other problems are that jails are fine but there is no disk I/O
limitation possible...

I've also thought about FreeBSD and while pkgng is really great it's a similar
problem.. I'm stumbling upon bugs or untested things and I'm unable to
contribute time to fixing them.

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tachion
Do you mind pointing to your PR's with the bugs you've found or at least
mention what they were? It sound like you've found a hell of a bugs/problems
in a system (and I am thinking about FreeBSD now) that me and huge number of
other people are running without any issues, so it would be beneficial for
everyone, if you'd share your problems with PR's - there is active community
around it that can fix issues if you are unable to do it.

~~~
nisa
Sorry if I was unclear. I stumbled upon a few issues running ZFS on Linux that
are known and on the development roadmap. Things like ARC integration and
better failure handling in case of disk problems.

I don't run anything big on FreeBSD and ZFS. I have not experienced problems
on a raidz2 ZFS fileserver that runs FreeBSD except that disks drop out quite
randomly but I've yet been unable to pinpoint that and it's likely that these
are hardware issues as the system runs on budget hardware.

Sorry if my comment spreaded FUD.

~~~
ryao
This might be of use to you: [http://open-
zfs.org/w/index.php?title=Hardware#Error_recover...](http://open-
zfs.org/w/index.php?title=Hardware#Error_recovery_control)

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wmf
It looks like this page was recently updated and coincidentally today he gave
a talk on Linux performance at LinuxCon:
[http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/linuxcon-north-
amer...](http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/linuxcon-north-
america/program/schedule)
[http://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/...](http://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/LinuxPerfTools_0.pdf)

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brendangregg
Yes, I gave the talk this morning. I hope people found it useful! In case
slideshare is quicker to load, the slides are also at:
[http://www.slideshare.net/brendangregg/linux-performance-
too...](http://www.slideshare.net/brendangregg/linux-performance-tools)

~~~
jaryd
Do you expect video of the presentation to be available any time in the near
future?

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brendangregg
Sorry, like other talks at LinuxCon, it was not videoed. I think it would be a
useful to have a video of it, so, much as I hate to give the same talk twice,
I'll probably do it again at some point for the video.

~~~
rodgerd
Don't tell me you didn't submit for linux.conf.au next year...

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josephyu0305
Nice link it show lot of Linux performance help when it comes the system
crash/ and very much learning i gotfrom his presentation.

