Monday March 02, 2009
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Monday March 02, 2009 The Inner Life of ZFS: Cool ZFS On-Disk Block Structure Movies
Pascal Gienger of Konstanz University published a nifty DTrace script that captures ZFS' on-disk block activity and published it on his Southbrain blog.
The cool thing: He animated the data. That's right. Using a Perl script, he draws greener or redder dots depending on whether a particular range of blocks on disk sees more reads or writes. By aggregating data over many hours while doing interesting tasks such as backup, he created a series of very cool animations.
In his first post, he shows us the inner life of a Postfix mail queue as an animated GIF:
Then, he compared the write patterns of UFS vs. ZFS using a MySQL workload to produce a cool MPEG-4 movie.
In his latest ZFS animation work, he shows us 18 hours of a mirrored file server including some backup, night rest and user action (Download MPEG-4 Movie here).
Congratulations, Pascal, this is way cool stuff. You really should upload these to YouTube so people can embed them in their blogs :).
Update: Meanwhile, pascal told me that he uploaded his videos on YouTube already. He has a full playlist full of them. Enjoy!
"The Inner Life of ZFS: Cool ZFS On-Disk Block Structure Movies" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2009-03-02 03:08:10.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
animation
cool
dtrace
mysql
structure
video
visualization
zfs
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