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Shouting in the Datacenter

Bryan Cantrill · 5.7M views · 2008-12-31 · 2:00

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Overview

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.

On Hacker News

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

Recommended by 4 HN people across 4 months · HN mentions 2011–2026

Topics

Software performance & optimizationHardware (other)Testing, debugging & developer tools
Search by tags
dtracehard driveslatencysun fishworksacoustic attack

What people said

kuon · 2022-08 · Recommendation

I had the "vibration" problem a few times in me IT career, train, construction work and once elevators. It is the kind of issue that are really hard to diagnose the first time but after the first time it's part of the standard "diagnose suite". I love to show this video about the effect of noise on HDD (be sure to put the volume down) [VIDEO]

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geerlingguy · 2021-04 · Recommendation

One 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!

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teraflop · 2017-12 · Recommendation

The 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!)

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Sources

Video by Bryan Cantrill, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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