SQL Server According to Bob

SEPTEMBER 26, 2016

When we released Always On Availability Groups in SQL Server 2012 as a new and powerful way to achieve high availability, hardware environments included NUMA machines with low-end multi-core processors and SATA and SAN drives for storage (some SSDs). As we moved towards SQL Server 2014, the pace of hardware accelerated.

Availability 40

Availability Servers Hardware Benchmarking 40

SQL Performance

JUNE 21, 2019

I've been teaching and writing about common SQL Server mistakes for many years. This article will expand on my previous article and point out how these apply to SQL Server , Azure SQL Database , and Azure SQL Managed Instance. SQL Server Agent alerts. This situation applies to on-premises SQL Server and IaaS. Statistics.

Servers 49

Servers Azure Hardware Database 49

Brendan Gregg

NOVEMBER 29, 2017

Hardware virtualization for cloud computing has come a long way, improving performance using technologies such as VT-x, SR-IOV, VT-d, NVMe, and APICv. The latest AWS hypervisor, Nitro, uses everything to provide a new hardware-assisted hypervisor that is easy to use and has near bare-metal performance. I'd expect between 0.1%

Virtualization 111

Virtualization AWS Hardware Storage 111

Brendan Gregg

JULY 4, 2021

I summarized these topics and more as a plenary conference talk, including my own predictions (as a senior performance engineer) for the future of computing performance, with a focus on back-end servers. This was a chance to talk about other things I've been working on, such as the present and future of hardware performance.

Performance 52

Performance Latency Hardware Storage 52

The Netflix TechBlog

APRIL 17, 2019

Netflix headquarters circa 2014. 264/AVC, currently, the most ubiquitous video compression standard supported by modern devices, often in hardware. The encoder can typically be improved years after the standard has been frozen including varying speed and quality trade-offs. It’s a nice building with good architecture!

Open Source 166

Open Source Scalability Speed Efficiency 166

Brendan Gregg

FEBRUARY 28, 2023

My personal opinion is that I don't see a widespread need for more capacity given horizontal scaling and servers that can already exceed 1 Tbyte of DRAM; bandwidth is also helpful, but I'd be concerned about the increased latency for adding a hop to more memory.

Performance 52

Performance Latency Cache Virtualization 52

SQL Performance

MARCH 17, 2020

Back in 2014, I wrote an article called Performance Tuning the Whole Query Plan. This follow-up post revisits the question for SQL Server 2019, using a larger number of rows. This machine has four i7 CPUs (hyperthreaded to 8) with a base speed of 2.4GHz. It has 32GB RAM, with 24GB available to the SQL Server 2019 instance.

Servers 86

Servers Tuning Database Efficiency 86

Brendan Gregg

NOVEMBER 28, 2017

Hardware virtualization for cloud computing has come a long way, improving performance using technologies such as VT-x, SR-IOV, VT-d, NVMe, and APICv. The latest AWS hypervisor, Nitro, uses everything to provide a new hardware-assisted hypervisor that is easy to use and has near bare-metal performance. I'd expect between 0.1%

Virtualization 40

Virtualization AWS Hardware Storage 40

Alex Russell

MARCH 6, 2021

Devices and networks have evolved too: Alex Russell @slightlylate An update on mobile CPUs and the Performance Inequality Gap: Mid-tier Android devices (~$300) now get the single-core performance of a 2014 iPhone and the multi-core perf of a 2015 iPhone. Hardware Past As Performance Prologue. Mind The Gap. How bad is it?

Performance 124

Performance Network Cache Metrics 124

SQL Performance

MARCH 8, 2021

SQL Server 2014 SP2 and later produce runtime (“actual”) execution plans that can include elapsed time and CPU usage for each execution plan operator (see KB3170113 and this blog post by Pedro Lopes). SQL Server makes some timing adjustments in parallel plans to promote consistency, but they are not perfectly implemented.

Servers 95

Servers Tuning Architecture Processing 95

Brendan Gregg

SEPTEMBER 5, 2017

Linux has been adding tracing technologies over the years: kprobes (kernel dynamic tracing), uprobes (user-level dynamic tracing), tracepoints (static tracing), and perf_events (profiling and hardware counters). Oracle VM Server is based on Xen. Outside of EC2, many other providers are deploying on KVM.

Virtualization 76

Virtualization AWS Engineering Hardware 76

Brendan Gregg

AUGUST 8, 2017

And here's an excerpt from [Linux] today (include/linux/sched/loadavg.h): #define EXP_1 1884 /* 1/exp(5sec/1min) as fixed-point */ #define EXP_5 2014 /* 1/exp(5sec/5min) */ #define EXP_15 2037 /* 1/exp(5sec/15min) */. Anyway, the following patch seems to make the load average much more consistent WRT the subjective speed of the system.

Latency 111

Latency Metrics C++ Systems 111