Alex Russell

MARCH 6, 2021

Back in 2016, I gave a talk outlining the causes and effects of the terrible performance of web apps built using popular tools on the fastest-growing device segment: low-end to mid-range Android phones. A then-representative $200USD device had 4-8 slow (in-order, low-cache) cores, ~2GiB of RAM, and relatively slow MLC NAND flash storage.

Performance 124

Performance Network Cache Metrics 124

SQL Performance

JUNE 21, 2019

While hardware such as intelligent SANs, Solid State Disk, and other advancements have helped speed things up, wasted space in index can translate to wasted space in the buffer pool as well as wasting more I/O. SQL Server Database Maintenance plans prior to SQL Server 2016 only allowed to rebuild or reorganize all indexes.

Servers 49

Servers Azure Hardware Database 49

Alex Russell

APRIL 29, 2021

At the time of the last Confluence run, the gap had stretched to nearly 1000 APIs, doubling since 2016. An extension to Service Workers that enables browsers to present users with cached content when offline. is access to hardware devices. Some commenters appear to confuse unlike hardware for differences in software.

Media 145

Media Games Education Engineering 145

Percona

JANUARY 17, 2019

On multi-core machines – which is the majority of the hardware nowadays – and in the cloud, we have multiple cores available for use. Aurora Parallel Query response time (for queries which can not use indexes) can be 5x-10x better compared to the non-parallel fully cached operations. The second and third run used the cached data.

Cache 46

Cache C++ AWS Airlines 46

Randon ASCII

FEBRUARY 25, 2018

In this particular investigation, which spanned twenty months, we suspected hardware failure, compiler bugs, linker bugs, and other possibilities. Jumping too quickly to blaming hardware or build tools is a classic mistake, but in this case the mistake was that we weren’t thinking big enough.

Programming 79

Programming Hardware Cache Code 79

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. This made it easier for database professionals to make the case for a hardware upgrade, and made the typical upgrade more worthwhile.

Servers 46

Servers Hardware Architecture Retail 46

John McCalpin

NOVEMBER 5, 2016

In the latest (October 2016) revision of Intel’s Instruction Extensions Programming Reference , Intel has disclosed a fairly dramatic departure from these “traditional” approaches. E.g., on Haswell you can execute two loads per cycle of any size or alignment as long as neither crosses a cache-line boundary.

Cache 40

Cache C++ Latency Hardware 40

Alex Russell

OCTOBER 22, 2017

Add onto that the yawning chasm between low-end and high-end device performance thanks to chip design factors like cache sizes, and it can be difficult to know where to set a device baseline. The true median device from 2016 sold at about ~$200 unlocked. — Monica Dinculescu (@notwaldorf) September 20, 2016.

Performance 68

Performance Benchmarking Network Mobile 68