Systems performance analysis is an important skill for all computer users, whether you’re trying to understand why your laptop is slow, or optimizing the performance of a large-scale production environment. It is the study of both operating system (kernel) and application performance, but can also lead to more specialized performance topics, for specific languages or applications. Systems performance is covered in my upcoming book: Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud, to be published by Prentice Hall this year.
By analyzing systems performance, you can identify and remove bottlenecks, improve throughput, and reduce latency. This, in turn, helps you do more with less, which can lead to large savings in large environments. This type of analysis also helps you to solve performance issues, such as latency outliers, which can cause customer dissatisfaction in any scale of environment. Other activities include benchmarking for the evaluation of systems, capacity planning, and scalability analysis – so that you discover scalability limiters early, and in time to fix them.
This book is primarily for system administrators, support staff, operators, and devops in enterprise and cloud environments. It is also a useful reference for developers, database administrators, and web server administrators who would like to understand operating system and application performance.
The draft manuscript is over 600 pages, with the following table of contents:
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1. Intro
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. Case Study
I’ve been writing it for many months, during which I’ve given talks based on material I was developing. These give you a preview of what is coming, and include my Linux Performance Analysis and Tools talk at SCaLE 11x, and my Performance Analysis Methodology talk at USENIX LISA`12.
Operating systems based on two different kernels are used as examples: Linux-based: Ubuntu, Fedora, and CentOS; and illumos-based (the active fork of OpenSolaris): SmartOS, and OmniOS. You may be interested in only one of these, but covering others provides additional perspective, helping you better understand the design choices, and performance results, of each.
While it covers performance tools and the background for understanding them, what makes this book different is the inclusion of many performance methodologies, including those covered quickly in my USENIX talk. I’ve been teaching and developing systems performance classes on and off for ten years, and have found methodologies to be crucial for giving students a starting point, and then guiding them through performance activities. The USE Method is one example I developed for this purpose.
Focusing on methodologies is one of the strategies I’ve used to make this book as timeless as possible, so that you can continue referring to it for the rest of your career. I’m still referring to The Art of Computer Systems Performance Analysis, by Raj Jain in 1991, over twenty years since it was written.
I’ll link to a sample chapter when it is available. Right now the book can be pre-ordered on Amazon
(details will be updated closer to the release). I’ve been referring to my in-development version often while working on performance issues in my day-to-day work, and I can’t wait for other people to have it in hand so they can do the same!
Thanks to all the reviewers, and to Deirdré Straughan for editing another one of my books!
