The Official Ubuntu Server Book, 3rd Edition

5. File Systems

File systems—an integral part of any operating system—have long been one of the most difficult components to observe when analyzing performance. This is largely because of the way file system data and metadata caching are implemented in the kernel but also because, until now, we simply haven’t had tools that can look into these kernel subsystems. Instead, we’ve analyzed slow I/O at the disk storage layer with tools such as iostat(1), even though this is many layers away from application latency. DTrace can be used to observe exactly how the file system responds to applications, how effective file system tuning is, and the internal operation of file system components. You can use it to answer questions such as the following.