Tuning the I/O Stack

Well, here we are at the end of our journey. Just because you are reading the introduction of the final chapter does not mean that you’ve read through the entire book, but I’ll take my chances. If you’ve indeed followed us along, then I hope your journey was worth it and has left you yearning for more.

Getting back to brass tacks, the previous two chapters centered on the performance analysis of the I/O stack. Chapter 9 focused on the most common disk metrics and the tools that can help us to identify performance bottlenecks in physical disks. In any performance analysis, the physical disks come under far more scrutiny than any other layer, which can sometimes be misleading. Therefore, in Chapter 10, we saw how we can investigate the higher layers in the I/O stack, such as filesystems and the block layer.

This brings us to the next logical step in our quest. Once we’ve identified the elements plaguing our environment, what steps...