"One of the sorely missing aspects of storage is analyzing and understanding the IO patterns of applications. This article will examine some techniques for performing IO profiling of an application to illustrate what information you can gain.
"One of the classic problems in designing storage solutions is that we don’t know what kind of IO performance applications need. We may have some empirical knowledge, “switching to SSD’s improved by wall clock time by 25%,” or, “adding an extra drive improved my application performance by 11%.” While this information is helpful to some degree what is missing is the understanding of why performance improved and by extension, what are the driving mechanisms behind the performance improvement. Perhaps equally important for the application developers is that understanding the driving forces of IO performance for your application can be used to improve the IO performance, if needed.
"This article is an introduction to using a common Linux system administration tool - strace. Strace output from an application can be used to produce a huge amount of information about the IO behavior of your application."
