Performance Tracker project update

[Borja Marcos]

On Jan 23, 2008, at 12:44 PM, Kris Kennaway wrote:

> One suggestion I have is that as more metrics are added it becomes  
> important for an "at a glance" overview of changes so we can monitor  
> for performance improvements and regressions among many workloads.
>
> One way to do this would be a matrix of each metric with its change  
> compared to recent samples.  e.g. you could do a student's T  
> comparison of today's numbers with those from yesterday, or from a  
> week ago, and colour-code those that show a significant deviation  
> from "no change". This might be a bit noisy on short timescales, so  
> you could aggregrate data into larger bins and compare e.g. moving 1- 
> week aggregates. Fluctuations on short timescales won't stand out,  
> but if there is a real change then it will show up less than a week  
> later.

And now for some publicity :)

I am a big fan of Orca (www.orcaware.com) which I have used regularly  
with Solaris *and*
FreeBSD. I wrote a performance data collector for FreeBSD, actually.

The advantage of Orca is that it gets simple text files with the  
performance data
and then it generates graphs and web pages periodically, keeping the  
data in RRD
databases. I think Orca would be really useful for this project.

And of course, if anyone wants to give "Devilator" a try, it currently  
graphs
CPU usage in system, interrupt, user time, disk I/O bandwidth, memory  
usage,
system and SWI CPU usage, process sleeping reasons... So far it's been  
really
helpful for me in order to identify bottlenecks.

Regards,






Borja.