Analyzing Physical Storage Performance

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." — Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Now that we’re done with understanding the nitty gritty of the storage landscape in Linux, we can put that understanding to practical use. I always like to compare the I/O stack with the OSI model in networking, where each layer has a dedicated function and uses a different data unit for communication. Over the course of the first eight chapters, we’ve increased our understanding of the layered hierarchy of the storage stack and its conceptual model. If you are still following along, you may have gained some understanding of how even the most basic requests from an application have to navigate through numerous layers before being processed by the underlying disks.

Being the good folks that we are, when we work with someone, we can be too willing to be captious and tend to enjoy nitpicking...