Systems Performance

Operating system performance analysis and tuning leads to a better end-user experience and lower costs, especially for cloud computing environments that pay by the OS instance. Systems Performance, 2nd Edition covers concepts, strategy, tools and tuning for Unix operating systems, with a focus on those that are Linux- and Solaris-based.
World-renowned system performance expert Brendan Gregg summarizes relevant operating system theory to quickly get professionals up to speed even if they’ve never optimized operating systems before, and to refresh and update advanced readers’ knowledge. Next, Gregg illuminates the latest tools and techniques, including dynamic tracing using DTrace and SystemTap, 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:

• Performance analysis and capacity planning
• Latency as a key theme for analysis
• New performance challenges associated with cloud computing
• Optimizing CPU, memory, file system, disk, and networking usage
• Sophisticated dynamic tracing with perf, ftrace, and BPF
• Benchmarking more effectively

Fully updated for current Linux/Unix operating systems and environments, Systems Performance, 2nd Edition addresses issues that apply across multiple distributions and are likely to remain crucial for many years to come.

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