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https://youtu.be/tDacjrSCeq4 reminds me of this gem.
So classic. For those weary of random links, it’s Cantrill and Gregg screaming at Thumpers and affecting IOPS. That was such a great machine. We rearchitected our systems around it.
For me, that is less meaningful and more random than a youtube link. I have absolutely no clue what you are talking about.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So classic. For those weary of random links, it’s Cantrill and Gregg screaming at Thumpers and affecting IOPS. That was such a great machine. We rearchitected our systems around it.
>it’s Cantrill and Gregg screaming at Thumpers and affecting IOPS. For me, that is less meaningful and more random than a youtube link. I have absolutely no clue what you are talking about.
In their younger days, two distinguished engineers, Bryan Cantrill and Brendan Gregg, made this video where they scream at a data storage server nicknamed Thumper. Screaming at it has surprising results, which are observed with a novel software technology called dtrace.
The Sun Fire X4500 was a dense storage sever, 4U with 48 disks and insane IO performance and a newish filesystem called ZFS. The video is not only funny in content, it features technology and technologists that became very impactful, hence the classic tag.
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I love the lore, so I'll drop more.
While our team previously used AFS (mainly for its great caching) and many storage servers, this hardware combined with its software allowed us to consolidate and manage and access data in new ways, alleviating many of our market data analysis problems.
We switched to NFS, which previously was not performant enough for us on other hw/sw architectures. While using NFS with the Thumpers and then Thors (X4540) was fantastic, eventually the data scales became hard again and we made a distributed immutable filesystem that looked like the Hadoop HDFS and Cassandra file systems, named after our favorite Klingon Worf (Write-Once Read-Frequently).
Interestingly, in 2025 both XTX [1] and HRT [2] open-sourced their distributed file systems which are pretty similar to it, using 2020's tech rather than 2000's. HRT's is based on Meta's Tectonic which is a spiritual successor to Cassandra.
I wrote about our parallel HFT networking journey once upon a time on HN. [3]
[1] https://www.xtxmarkets.com/tech/2025-ternfs/
[2] https://www.hudsonrivertrading.com/hrtbeat/distributed-files...
I'd love to know whether that story is actually true. Some dude hears somebody tell a story about sth 20 years ago, puts it in a blog, and here we are on HN, nobody questioning whether it's actually accurate. Of course Raymond Chen isn't just any random person, but the more important it would be to actually check? I mean, who hasn't heard people tell stories from decades ago, including colleagues reminiscing about th…
For a F1 drive axle the critical resonance frequency is around 2400 rpm. That's why you need to turn it up fast at start over the safe 4000 rpm, and never go down. Without the ECU you can easily break it by starting too slow
Wouldn’t a multiple of the resonance frequency also be problematic then? Why doesn’t the axle disintegrate at 4800 rpm?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>it’s Cantrill and Gregg screaming at Thumpers and affecting IOPS. For me, that is less meaningful and more random than a youtube link. I have absolutely no clue what you are talking about.
That is fair, particularly compared to Janet Jackson! I will add detail. In their younger days, two distinguished engineers, Bryan Cantrill and Brendan Gregg, made this video where they scream at a data storage server nicknamed Thumper. Screaming at it has surprising results, which are observed with a novel software technology called dtrace. The Sun Fire X4500 was a dense storage sever, 4U with 48 disks and insane IO…
Edit: I clearly just got derailed by my initial confusion, there was nothing weird about your usage.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is fair, particularly compared to Janet Jackson! I will add detail. In their younger days, two distinguished engineers, Bryan Cantrill and Brendan Gregg, made this video where they scream at a data storage server nicknamed Thumper. Screaming at it has surprising results, which are observed with a novel software technology called dtrace. The Sun Fire X4500 was a dense storage sever, 4U with 48 disks and insane IO…
It was your rather odd usage of "affecting" that caused my confusion, made me think IOPS was some new internet acronym and something which could be affected as one would affect continental to sound cultured. I would have gotten the general gist had you said "causing IOPS" or if I knew Thumpers or maybe if you had used the full names of Cantrill and Gregg but I am not sure if I would have made that connection. Thanks…
If someone does something that has an impact on IOPS, then it's sensible to say they (or what they're doing) are "affecting IOPS."
Screaming at the JBOD wasn't "causing" IOPS, so using that phrase would've been more confusing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was your rather odd usage of "affecting" that caused my confusion, made me think IOPS was some new internet acronym and something which could be affected as one would affect continental to sound cultured. I would have gotten the general gist had you said "causing IOPS" or if I knew Thumpers or maybe if you had used the full names of Cantrill and Gregg but I am not sure if I would have made that connection. Thanks…
I don't understand what you find odd about "affecting IOPS." If someone does something that has an impact on IOPS, then it's sensible to say they (or what they're doing) are "affecting IOPS." Screaming at the JBOD wasn't "causing" IOPS, so using that phrase would've been more confusing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand what you find odd about "affecting IOPS." If someone does something that has an impact on IOPS, then it's sensible to say they (or what they're doing) are "affecting IOPS." Screaming at the JBOD wasn't "causing" IOPS, so using that phrase would've been more confusing.
Right, I covered that in my edit which I probably made as you were writing your post. It was just one of those situations where a small amount of confusion compounds until you have lost sight of reality.
https://everything2.com/title/7+hertz+-+the+resonant+frequen... Example (for both functions): /* Emits a 7-Hz tone for 10 seconds. True story: 7 Hz is the resonant frequency of a chicken's skull cavity. This was determined empirically in Australia, where a new factory generating 7-Hz tones was located too close to a chicken ranch: When the factory started up, all the chickens died. Your PC may not be able to emit a 7…