hackertube.io

Shouting in the Datacenter

Bryan Cantrill · demo · Watch on YouTube

Software performance & optimizationHardware (other)Testing, debugging & developer tools

What it is

A two-minute 2008 clip from Sun's Fishworks team in which Brendan Gregg uses DTrace to show disk latency spiking while he shouts at a rack of drives. Bryan Cantrill narrates the demonstration.

Why Hacker News recommends it

It is the go-to viral demo whenever HN discusses vibration, acoustic attacks, or sound affecting hard drives.

  • 4 people recommended it
  • 4 different months
  • 0 strong recommendations
  • first 2011, last 2026

What HN commenters said

  1. “a Sun engineer uses dtrace to show HDD latency spiking after he yells at his disks”

    Demo of HDD latency spiking when yelling at disks.

    dorianj, 2011-08 · Recommendation · in “SeatGeek Blog: What An Earthquake Does To Page Load Time”

  2. “this entertaining YouTube video from 2009, in which someone demonstrates the effect by literally shouting at a rack of servers”

    Entertaining demo of shouting at a rack of servers.

    teraflop, 2017-12 · Recommendation · in “Acoustic Denial of Service Attacks on HDDs”

  3. “an older clip (from the pre-HD era) demonstrating the consequence of doing exactly what the title says”

    Classic clip showing consequence of shouting at disks.

    geerlingguy, 2021-04 · Recommendation · in “Raspberry Pi 2.5 Gbps OMV NAS Performance”

  4. “I love to show this video about the effect of noise on HDD”

    Shows effect of noise on HDD performance.

    kuon, 2022-08 · Recommendation · in “Song from 1989 declared a cybersecurity vulnerability for crashing hard drives”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: dtrace, hard drives, latency, sun fishworks, acoustic attack

Also recommended by the same people