THE VIDEO SHELF · disk latency and vibration
Shouting in the Datacenter
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 HN readers recommended it
It is the go-to viral demo whenever HN discusses vibration, acoustic attacks, or sound affecting hard drives.
This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.
Video & recommendation details
- Creator / channel
- Bryan Cantrill
- Topic
- disk latency and vibration
- Format
- demo
- Level
- general
- HN recommenders in dataset
- 4
- HN mentions in dataset
- 20
- Recommendation years in dataset
- 2011–2026
These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.
From the original HN conversations
Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.
Also interesting: a Sun engineer uses dtrace to show HDD latency spiking after he yells at his disks [VIDEO]
dorianj on Hacker News · 2011-08
In SeatGeek Blog: What An Earthquake Does To Page Load TimeThe paper links to this entertaining YouTube video from 2009, in which someone demonstrates the effect by literally shouting at a rack of servers: [VIDEO] (EDIT: replaced the link I found via YouTube's search with the original, thanks robotmlg!)
teraflop on Hacker News · 2017-12
In Acoustic Denial of Service Attacks on HDDsOne of the little gems I found while I was putting together the video for this post was "Shouting in the datacenter", an older clip (from the pre-HD era) demonstrating the consequence of doing exactly what the title says: [VIDEO] Warning: loud!
geerlingguy on Hacker News · 2021-04
In Raspberry Pi 2.5 Gbps OMV NAS Performance
Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.