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 140

Performance Latency Hardware Storage 140

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

Brendan Gregg

MARCH 16, 2024

2015-2020: Overhead As part of production rollout I did many performance overhead tests, which I've described publicly before: The overhead of adding frame pointers to everything (libc and Java) was usually less than 1%, with one exception of 10%. Back-end servers. I should do a blog post just on SFrames.

Java 145

Java Cache Google Hardware 145

Brendan Gregg

SEPTEMBER 25, 2021

This server is spending about a third of its CPU cycles just checking the time! As a Xen guest, this profile was gathered using perf(1) and the kernel's software cpu-clock soft interrupts, not the hardware NMI. I also shared setting the clocksource in my talks and in my 2015 [Linux tunables] post. But I'm not completely sure.

Speed 126

Speed Java AWS Virtualization 126

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

SQL Performance

JULY 16, 2019

A close monitoring of the hardware enthusiast community, including many of the most respected hardware analysts and reviewers paints an even more dire picture about Intel in the server processor space. Despite all of this, Intel is not going to lose their entire server processor business any time soon.

Servers 46

Servers Hardware Architecture Retail 46

Brendan Gregg

SEPTEMBER 25, 2021

This server is spending about a third of its CPU cycles just checking the time! As a Xen guest, this profile was gathered using perf(1) and the kernel's software cpu-clock soft interrupts, not the hardware NMI. I also shared setting the clocksource in my talks and in my 2015 [Linux tunables] post. But I'm not completely sure.

Speed 40

Speed Java AWS Virtualization 40