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.
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