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."

Comments

Relevance to Latency

[headkase]

Sorry, should have mentioned why this comment should be in this story. The flip side of measurement of your systems latency to improve performance is to optimize your program as well as the system. Pyke is a meta-programming framework and in effect caches your programs structure and variables dramatically improving performance. Which is latency.