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Learn about ntprof, a systematic and lightweight profiler for NVMe-over-TCP (NVMe/TCP) remote storage protocol in this 17-minute conference presentation from NSDI '25. Discover how researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison address the lack of profiling utilities for this emerging storage protocol that's increasingly adopted in enterprises and clouds. Explore the key innovation of modeling the NVMe/TCP storage substrate as a lossless switched network and applying network monitoring techniques, where each on-path system module functions as a software switch equipped with programmable profiling agents. Understand the architecture of ntprof, which comprises a kernel module and user-space utility that enables developers to define various profiling tasks while incurring minimal overhead when co-located with applications. Examine six practical application cases including end-to-end latency breakdown, interference analysis, software/hardware bottleneck localization, and application performance diagnostics. Gain insights into how this tool addresses the challenges of unpredictable I/O workload profiles, intricate system layer interactions, and deep execution pipelines in NVMe/TCP environments, with the open-source implementation built on Linux kernel 5.15.143.
