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IO Tracer and Parser

Akanksha Mahajan edited this page Sep 1, 2021 · 9 revisions

On Posix systems we can use existing tracing mechanism(strace, blktrace etc.) to understand the system calls, IO requests. But on storage systems where we cannot use existing tracing tools, we added a mechanism to trace IO operations to understand IO behavior of RocksDB while accessing data on the storage.

Table of Contents

IO Trace Format

IO trace record contains following information:

Required for all records:

Column Name Values Comment
Access timestamp in microseconds unsigned long
File Operation string type of operation (Append, Read,...).
Latency unsigned long
IO Status IO Status of the file operation returned.
File Name string File name is printed instead of full file path

Based on File Operation:

Column Name Values Comment
Length unsigned long
Offset unsigned long
File Size unsigned long

Usage

An example to start IO tracing:

Env* env = rocksdb::Env::Default();
EnvOptions env_options;
std::string trace_path = "/tmp/binary_trace_test_example”;
std::unique_ptr<TraceWriter> trace_writer;
DB* db = nullptr;
std::string db_name = "/tmp/rocksdb”;

/*Create the trace file writer*/
NewFileTraceWriter(env, env_options, trace_path, &trace_writer);

DB::Open(options, dbname);

/*Start IO tracing*/
db->StartIOTrace(env, trace_opt, std::move(trace_writer));

/*Your call of RocksDB APIs */
DB::Put();

/*End IO tracing*/
db->EndIOTrace();

If you call DB::Put then io_tracer will record all the FileSystem APIs called during DB::Put.

Implementation

IO Tracer Parser

The trace file generated from IO tracing is in binary format. So parser can be used to read that binary trace file

./io_tracer_parser -io_trace_file trace_file

Implementation details can be found in https://github.com/facebook/rocksdb/tree/main/tools/io_tracer_parser_tool.h

Planned Work

  • Trace DB::Open
  • Include more information in trace format

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