Nibble of Thoughts

Recently my laptop speaker conked off, and I have been using the earplugs since then.
But there is this irritating high-pitched beep which occurs every time there is a keyboard error, and it can really hurt.

I tried unsetting Beep from the gnome-sound-properties, but to no avail.
Finally I found a way to do this, and I am sure my ears are much happier now.

$ /usr/openwin/bin/xset b 0
$ /usr/openwin/bin/xset b off
$ /usr/openwin/bin/xset -b

Fenxi is a pluggable Java-based post-processing performance analysis tool. For a brief overview on Fenxi, please read Neel's blog.

So what is all this talk about Fenxi, where do I get it and how do I use it?

Fenxi is a post-processing tool and does not collect the metrics. It has built-in parsers for handling the output from tools such as mpstat, iostat, vmstat, etc. (Refer to user-manual for complete list.) and publishes the processed results in HTML format.

Fenxi has been published on Java.Net and is available as a binary or via CVS from http://fenxi.dev.java.net.

Download the latest fenxi binary package and untar the package as follows:
gzcat fenxi-latest.tar.gz | tar xvf -
Make sure that you have Java 1.5 or above and Perl 5.6 or greater installed.

To run a simple test on Fenxi, here's what you do.

1. Create a directory, say Fenxi_Test.
2. Generate mpstat and vmstat outputs and store them as mpstat.out, vmstat.out respectively:
   mpstat 1 10 > Fenxi_Test/mpstat.out
vmstat 1 10 > Fenxi_Test/vmstat.out
3. Now that you have your performance data, we can go ahead and process them. To process it with Fenxi, run:
   fenxi process Fenxi_Test Fenxi_Test/html Run1
4. This generates and output like:

       Creating database ...                            4.34s
       Parsing raw files ...                            2.25s
       Loading create statements from txt
       Loading vmstat_out                               ...+..+..+..OK
       Loading mpstat_out                               ...+..+..+..OK
       Processing profile default_profile               ...OK
       | Generating section   39/39       0 errors
       Query Execute took                               5.86s
       HTML Generation took                             2.03s
   

5. The processed HTML files are new available in Fenxi_Test/html directory and can be viewed in a browser. If there are any errors in the format of the file, it would show the number of errors, and we can drill down using fenxi.log. For any database errors, we can look into derby.log for further details.

Fenxi can also be used to compare two or more runs.

1. Create directory Fenxi_Test2 and redo the steps in simple test, replacing Fenxi_Test with Fenxi_Test2. This will generate the mpstat.out and vmstat.out files and have them processed using:
   fenxi process Fenxi_Test2 Fenxi_Test2/html Run2
2. Compare the two runs using:
   fenxi compare Fenxi_Test/html Fenxi_Test2/html Fenxi_compare
3. The output can be viewed on a browser via the index.html file created in the Fenxi_compare directory.

Expect future blogs on the various features of Fenxi and how to customize it.