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Visualizing System Latency
ChelleChelle writes "Latency has a direct impact on performance — thus, in order to identify performance issues it is absolutely essential to understand latency. With the introduction of DTrace it is now possible to measure latency at arbitrary points; the problem, however, is how to visually present this data in an effective manner. Toward this end, heat maps can be a powerful tool. When I/O latency is presented as a visual heat map, some intriguing and beautiful patterns can emerge. These patterns provide insight into how a system is actually performing and what kinds of latency end-user applications experience."
How bout you RTFA before you make you're smartass comments, since yours is almost a direct fucking quote from it. However, this isn't about measuring network latency, it's about disk latency, something that until recently was extraordinarily hard to measure.
All truly informative articles follow this paradigm. You only need the multi-page, multi-ad to pay for content that very few people will read because it's not that informative or interesting.