[SPDK] A few thoughts about spdk_top

[Stojaczyk, Dariusz <dariusz.stojaczyk at intel.com>]

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I like the idea of spdk_top application, although I'm slightly concerned about our implementation. Is it a right choice to develop it in C? It's already a huge amount of code and it already has a huge amount of limitations, not even mentioning possible bugs. I actually spent a lot of time developing in curses, GTK, GTKmm and even WinAPI and I don't do it anymore because it's difficult and not worth it. I switched to javascript as well as server-side javascript for my other projects and I find it incredibly easier to write user apps there. I'm not trying to push on javascript specifically, but could we consider writing spdk_top in a higher level language, where we don't care about memory allocation, json parsing, and printing data to the screen?

Currently spdk_top seems to require the same, detailed review as any spdk patch and honestly I'm a bit reluctant to review it. Moreover, I find one major feature missing there - a view with all pollers on a specific, single thread and busy time % for each poller, so that I can see what my thread is most busy with. I think it would be the first view I check when doing any spdk optimization. Yet I see it's quite a bit of effort to add it to the current spdk_top code, which brings me back to my first question.

D.