Chapter 9
Disks
Disk I/O can cause significant application latency, and is therefore an important target of systems performance analysis. Under high load, disks become a bottleneck, leaving CPUs idle as the system waits for disk I/O to complete. Identifying and eliminating these bottlenecks can improve performance and application throughput by orders of magnitude.
The term disks refers to the primary storage devices of the system. They include flash-memory-based solid-state disks (SSDs) and magnetic rotating disks. SSDs were introduced primarily to improve disk I/O performance, which they do. However, demands for capacity, I/O rates, and throughput are also increasing, and flash memory devices are not immune to performance issues.
The learning ...
Get Systems Performance, 2nd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
