bitehist_example.txt

Demonstrations of bitehist.py, the Linux eBPF/bcc version.

This prints a power-of-2 histogram to show the block I/O size distribution.
A summary is printed after Ctrl-C is hit.

# ./bitehist.py
Tracing... Hit Ctrl-C to end.
^C
     kbytes          : count     distribution
       0 -> 1        : 3        |                                      |
       2 -> 3        : 0        |                                      |
       4 -> 7        : 211      |**********                            |
       8 -> 15       : 0        |                                      |
      16 -> 31       : 0        |                                      |
      32 -> 63       : 0        |                                      |
      64 -> 127      : 1        |                                      |
     128 -> 255      : 800      |**************************************|

This output shows a bimodal distribution. The largest mod of 800 I/O were
between 128 and 255 Kbytes in size, and another mode of 211 I/O were between
4 and 7 Kbytes in size.

Understanding this distribution is useful for characterizing workloads and
understanding performance. The existence of this distribution is not visible
from averages alone.