seekwatcher 0.14
About 10 years ago I tried seekwatcher for the first time (unfortunately past videos and pictures did not survive host migrations). There I explored slowness of btrfs on my spinning drive and concluded IO was seek-bound.
Believe it or not seekwatcher code did not change at all since then. It was abandoned upstream in favour of iowatcher: http://masoncoding.com/iowatcher/. I never knew there was a replacement and kept tweaking seekwatcher for minor failures like dash incompatibilities. Eventually (8 years later) I released the result as 0.13. Looking at it 2 years later effectively nobody uses 0.13: https://repology.org/project/seekwatcher/versions. This is fine. Most distributions effectively abandoned seekwatcher or never had it packages in the first place. I myself did not have a reason to use it for years and did not notice it’s build broke again.
I spent this weekend to refurbish it a bit. The result is a new 0.14 release! It should be able to run on modern Python 3.10 (and something less modern as well).
As a demo today’s video and picture will be a read-only workload for btrfs scrub against a 35% filled root SSD partition for my desktop:
$ seekwatcher -t scrub.trace -p 'echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches; sync; btrfs scrub start -B /' -d /dev/nvme0n1p3
$ seekwatcher -t scrub.trace -o scrub.ogg --movie
$ seekwatcher -t scrub.trace -o scrub.pngThe output of the above commands is also instructive:
blktrace -d /dev/nvme0n1p3 -o scrub.trace -D . -a queue -a complete -a issue
running :echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches; sync; btrfs scrub start -B /:
scrub done for 6b160f29-1dbb-4020-a36d-c233f1dffaf6
Scrub started: Mon Jan 17 07:52:29 2022
Status: finished
Duration: 0:01:08
Total to scrub: 404.02GiB
Rate: 2.17GiB/s
Error summary: no errors found
done running echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches; sync; btrfs scrub start -B /
=== nvme0n1p3 ===
CPU 0: 876508 events, 41087 KiB data
CPU 1: 693423 events, 32505 KiB data
CPU 2: 537656 events, 25203 KiB data
CPU 3: 592174 events, 27759 KiB data
CPU 4: 511254 events, 23966 KiB data
CPU 5: 495733 events, 23238 KiB data
CPU 6: 503972 events, 23624 KiB data
CPU 7: 593066 events, 27800 KiB data
CPU 8: 783384 events, 36722 KiB data
CPU 9: 626492 events, 29367 KiB data
CPU 10: 938655 events, 44000 KiB data
CPU 11: 815019 events, 38205 KiB data
CPU 12: 765571 events, 35887 KiB data
CPU 13: 603239 events, 28277 KiB data
CPU 14: 813953 events, 38155 KiB data
CPU 15: 686623 events, 32186 KiB data
Total: 10836722 events (dropped 0), 507972 KiB data
blktrace done
using tracefile ./scrub.trace
saving graph to trace.png
using tracefile ./scrub.trace
total frames is 300 secs per frame = 0.23
start 0.00 secs end 0.23 secs frame 0
start 0.23 secs end 0.46 secs frame 1
start 0.46 secs end 0.68 secs frame 2
start 0.68 secs end 0.91 secs frame 3
start 0.91 secs end 1.14 secs frame 4
...
MEncoder 1.4-10.3.0 (C) 2000-2019 MPlayer Team
...Note that seekwatcher is a wrapper around blktrace and mencoder: it’s main job is to build a 30-second clip off any data by donwsampling things.
Here is the result of the above commands:
The average read speed is 2.2GB/s with 17K IO/s of them seeks are 2.5K/s.
The equivalent iowatcher commands should look identical.
That’s it!