We have started seeing misaligned partitions on Linux guests runnning certain HDFS distributions. How these partitions became mis-aligned is a bit of a mystery, because the only way I know how to do this on Linux is to create a partition using old DOS format like this (using -c=dos and -u=cylinders)
Read More →Category: Debugging
Often we are presented with a vCenter screenshot, and an observation that there are “high latency spikes”. In the example, the response time is indeed quite high – around 80ms.
Read More →TL;DR Comparison of Paravirtual SCSI Vs Emulated SCSI in with measurements. PVSCSI gives measurably better response times at high load. During a performance debugging session, I noticed that the response time on two of the SCSI devices was much higher than the others (Linux host under vmware ESX). The difference was unexpected since all the devices…
Read More →Many storage devices/filesystems treat blocks containing nothing but zeros in a special way, often short-circuiting reads from the back-end. This is normally a good thing but this behavior can cause odd results when benchmarking. This typically comes up when testing against storage using raw devices that have been thin provisioned. In this example, I have several…
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