Systems Performance

Systems Performance, Second Edition, covers concepts, strategy, tools, and tuning for operating systems and applications, using Linux-based operating systems as the primary example. A deep understanding of these tools and techniques is critical for developers today. Implementing the strategies described in this thoroughly revised and updated edition can lead to a better end-user experience and lower costs, especially for cloud computing environments that charge by the OS instance.

Systems performance expert and best-selling author Brendan Gregg summarizes relevant operating system, hardware, and application theory to quickly get professionals up to speed even if they have never analyzed performance before. Gregg then provides in-depth explanations of the latest tools and techniques, including extended BPF, and shows how to get the most out of cloud, web, and large-scale enterprise systems. Key topics covered include

• 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

Featuring up-to-date coverage of Linux operating systems and environments, Systems Performance, Second Edition, also addresses issues that apply to any computer system. The book will be a go-to reference for many years to come and, like the first edition, required reading at leading tech companies.
 
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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 and performance lead, 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.

Preface 1. Introduction 2. Methodology 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
Appendices A. USE Linux B. sar Summary C. bpftrace one-liners D. Solutions to Selected Examples E. Who's Who Bibliography