Archived Blog Posts

A selection of my older archived posts.

dtrace.org/blogs/brendan (2010-2014)

I first posted these on dtrace.org/blogs/brendan, although some were unrelated to the DTrace performance tool. I was working for the first container-based cloud, one based on the Solaris/illumos operating systems, and covered topics including virtualization performance. I've included these for historical reference. Linux, tracing, and virtualization have all progressed significantly since then, as covered on my current blog.

• 11 Feb 2014 » Another 10 Performance Wins
• 10 Jan 2014 » Benchmarking the Cloud
• 13 Nov 2013 » Cloud Performance Training
• 28 Oct 2013 » Systems Performance: available now
• 20 Oct 2013 » Open Source Systems Performance
• 05 Oct 2013 » Control T for TENEX
• 27 May 2013 » The Greatest Tool that Never Worked: har
• 11 Jan 2013 » Virtualization Performance: Zones, KVM, Xen
• 29 Dec 2012 » zfsday: ZFS Performance Analysis and Tools
• 13 Dec 2012 » USENIX LISA 2012: Performance Analysis Methodology
• 10 Dec 2012 » USENIX LISA 2010: Visualizations for Performance Analysis
• 14 Nov 2012 » DTracing in Anger
• 21 Sep 2012 » FISL13: The USE Method
• 12 Aug 2012 » DTrace Training
• 09 Aug 2012 » 10 Performance Wins
• 08 May 2012 » dtrace.conf 2012 videos
• 30 Jan 2012 » Performance Analysis talk at SCALE10x
• 09 Jan 2012 » Activity of the ZFS ARC
• 08 Dec 2011 » 2000x performance win
• 25 Nov 2011 » DTrace variable types
• 09 Nov 2011 » Solaris 11 DTrace syscall Provider Changes
• 15 Oct 2011 » Using SystemTap
• 10 Oct 2011 » Top 10 DTrace scripts for Mac OS X
• 02 Oct 2011 » DTrace Book short videos
• 26 Sep 2011 » Observing Observer: A Cloud Analytics Case Study
• 06 Jul 2011 » Breaking Down MySQL/Percona Query Latency With DTrace
• 30 Jun 2011 » Tweaking memory on the fly
• 27 Jun 2011 » Viewing the Invisible
• 23 Jun 2011 » MySQL performance schema and DTrace
• 03 Jun 2011 » File System Latency: part 5
• 24 May 2011 » File System Latency: part 4
• 18 May 2011 » File System Latency: part 3
• 13 May 2011 » File System Latency: part 2
• 11 May 2011 » File System Latency: part 1
• 14 Mar 2011 » MySQL Query Latency with the DTrace pid Provider
• 08 Mar 2011 » DTrace book talk SFOSUG
• 23 Feb 2011 » DTrace book sample chapter: File Systems
• 19 Feb 2011 » DTrace pid Provider Links
• 18 Feb 2011 » DTrace pid Provider Overhead
• 16 Feb 2011 » DTrace pid Provider Instructions
• 14 Feb 2011 » DTrace pid Provider return
• 11 Feb 2011 » DTrace pid Provider Arguments
• 09 Feb 2011 » DTrace pid Provider
• 24 Jan 2011 » Cloud Analytics: first video

blogs.sun.com/brendan (2006-2010)

I first posted these on blogs.sun.com/brendan which later became blogs.oracle.com/brendan, where I mostly discussed my work at Sun Microsystems. This included improving the performance of the Sun ZFS 7000 series storage appliance, and helping develop and use its Kstat/DTrace-based Analytics observability tool. These posts also became the primary source of performance data for Sun sales, and included many Analytics screenshots to prove that the storage appliance could do what I claimed it could do.

• 23 Sep 2010 » DTrace book coming soon
• 05 Jun 2010 » Visualizing System Latency
• 15 May 2010 » Performance Instrumentation Counters: short talk
• 27 Jan 2010 » iSCSI before and after
• 17 Nov 2009 » NFS Analytics example
• 11 Nov 2009 » FROSUG perf horrors
• 05 Nov 2009 » DTrace Cheatsheet
• 08 Oct 2009 » Hybrid Storage Pool: Top Speeds
• 22 Sep 2009 » 7410 hardware update, and analyzing the HyperTransport
• 09 Jul 2009 » KCA2009
• 26 Jun 2009 » SLOG Screenshots
• 12 Jun 2009 » Latency Art: X marks the spot
• 27 May 2009 » My Sun Storage 7310 perf limits
• 26 May 2009 » Performance Testing the 7000 series, part 3 of 3
• 02 Apr 2009 » Performance Testing the 7000 series, part 2 of 3
• 23 Mar 2009 » Performance Testing the 7000 series, part 1 of 3
• 17 Mar 2009 » Heat Map Analytics
• 12 Mar 2009 » Latency Art: Rainbow Pterodactyl
• 03 Mar 2009 » CIFS at 1 Gbyte/sec
• 23 Feb 2009 » Networking Analytics Example
• 06 Feb 2009 » DRAM Latency
• 30 Jan 2009 » L2ARC Screenshots
• 09 Jan 2009 » My Sun Storage 7410 perf limits
• 09 Jan 2009 » 1 Gbyte/sec NFS, streaming from disk
• 31 Dec 2008 » Unusual Disk Latency
• 31 Dec 2008 » JBOD Analytics Example
• 15 Dec 2008 » Up to 2 Gbytes/sec NFS
• 02 Dec 2008 » A quarter million NFS IOPS
• 10 Nov 2008 » Status Dashboard
• 22 Jul 2008 » ZFS L2ARC
• 10 Aug 2007 » DTrace Bourne shell (sh) provider
• 31 Jul 2007 » iSCSI DTrace Provider
• 30 Jul 2007 » JavaScript Provider ver 2.0
• 29 Jul 2007 » DTracing Off-CPU Time
• 05 Mar 2007 » Audio Volume CLI
• 27 Feb 2007 » AMD64 PICs, CPI
• 29 Jan 2007 » Colortrace
• 04 Nov 2006 » DTracing vim Latency
• 05 Oct 2006 » DTrace TCP provider at CEC 2006
• 18 Sep 2006 » DTrace meets JavaScript
• 17 Sep 2006 » Brendan joins Sun

bdgregg.blogspot.com (2005-2006)

I first posted these on bdgregg.blogspot.com, a former personal blog where I discussed my spare time projects including the DTraceToolkit. After 2006 I did publish some posts here to separate them from my new role at Sun, up until 2015.

• 15 May 2015 » The DTraceToolkit Project Has Ended
• 05 Sep 2013 » DTraceToolkit 0.XX Mistakes
• 17 Jul 2013 » Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud
• 24 Jun 2008 » DTrace in New York
• 18 Feb 2008 » DTraceToolkit in MacOS X
• 05 Oct 2007 » DTraceToolkit ver 0.99
• 14 Dec 2006 » Updates from California
• 11 Aug 2006 » How much CPU does a down interface chew?
• 08 Aug 2006 » Solaris Performance and Tools
• 18 Jul 2006 » DTrace Slides
• 31 May 2006 » DTraceTazTool - alpha release
• 28 May 2006 » DTracing Scheduling Classes
• 08 May 2006 » Ged - GUI-ed
• 25 Apr 2006 » DTraceToolkit ver 0.96
• 04 Apr 2006 » Solaris Internals 2nd Edition
• 12 Feb 2006 » Learn DTrace, visit Sydney
• 27 Jan 2006 » Solaris checkcable 0.95
• 12 Jan 2006 » Brendan Clones
• 10 Jan 2006 » findbill
• 11 Dec 2005 » Solaris Performance Metrics
• 01 Dec 2005 » Homepage
• 30 Nov 2005 » Sys Admin Magazine
• 25 Nov 2005 » DTrace Translators
• 20 Nov 2005 » ZFS
• 09 Oct 2005 » Network Monitoring
• 26 Sep 2005 » mdb ::wumpus
• 28 Aug 2005 » APC
• 27 Jun 2005 » DExplorer
• 26 May 2005 » Created This

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