Systems Performance

Systems performance analysis and tuning lead to a better end-user experience and lower costs, especially for cloud computing environments that charge by the OS instance. Systems Performance, 2nd Edition covers concepts, strategy, tools, and tuning for operating systems and applications, using Linux-based operating systems as the primary example.

World-renowned systems performance expert Brendan Gregg summarizes relevant operating system, hardware, and application theory to quickly get professionals up to speed even if they’ve never analyzed performance before, and to refresh and update advanced readers’ knowledge. Gregg illuminates the latest tools and techniques, including extended BPF, showing how to get the most out of your systems in cloud, web, and large-scale enterprise environments. He covers these and other key topics:

• Hardware, kernel, and application internals, and how they perform
• Methodologies for rapid performance analysis of complex systems
• Optimizing CPU, memory, file system, disk, and networking usage
• Sophisticated profiling and tracing with perf, Ftrace, and BPF (BCC and bpftrace)
• Performance challenges associated with cloud computing hypervisors
• Benchmarking more effectively

Fully updated for current Linux operating systems and environments, Systems Performance, 2nd Edition addresses issues that apply to any computer system. The book will be a go-to reference for many years to come and recommended reading at many tech companies, like its predecessor first edition.

“For the past six years I have been a senior performance engineer at Netflix, applying the field of systems performance to the Netflix microservices environment. I’ve worked on the performance of hypervisors, containers, runtimes, kernels, databases, and applications. I’ve developed new methodologies and tools as needed, and worked with experts in cloud performance and Linux kernel engineering. These experiences have contributed to improving this edition.”

— Brendan Gregg, December 2020

Contents

1 Introduction

2 Methodologies

3 Operating Systems

4 Observability Tools

5 Applications

6 CPUs

7 Memory

8 File Systems

9 Disks

10 Network

11 Cloud Computing

12 Benchmarking

13 perf

14 Ftrace

15 BPF

16 Case Study

About the Author

Brendan Gregg is an industry expert in computing performance and cloud computing. He is a senior performance architect at Netflix, where he does performance design, evaluation, analysis, and tuning. The author of multiple technical books including BPF Performance Tools and Systems Performance, he received the USENIX LISA Award for Outstanding Achievement in System Administration. He has also been a kernel engineer, performance lead, and professional technical trainer, and was program co-chair for the USENIX LISA 2018 conference. He has created performance tools included in multiple operating systems, and visualizations and methodologies for performance analysis, including flame graphs.