New NFS Tracing Tools and Techniques for System Analysis

Passive NFS traces provide an easy and unobtrusive way to measure, analyze, and gain an understanding of an NFS workload. Historically, such traces have been used primarily by file system researchers in an attempt to understand, categorize, and generalize file system workloads. However, because such traces provide a wealth of detailed information about how a specific system is actually used, they should also be of interest to system administrators. We introduce a new open- source toolkit for passively gathering and summarizing NFS traces and show how to use this toolkit to perform analyses that are difficult or impossible with existing tools.