Dynatrace

JUNE 15, 2023

If your application runs on servers you manage, either on-premises or on a private cloud, you’re responsible for securing the application as well as the operating system, network infrastructure, and physical hardware. What are some key characteristics of securing cloud applications?

Cloud 176

Cloud Open Source Architecture Monitoring 176

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

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 110

Performance Latency Cache Virtualization 110

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 Server According to Bob

JUNE 6, 2016

As indicated, SQL Server 2016 added the use of SSE and AVX instructions in various code paths to improve performance. This post will outline SQL Server’s decisions around SSE/AVX or software algorithm use. SQL Server asks the CPU if it supports SSE or AVX in order to determine the level of hardware support present on the system.

Servers 40

Servers Hardware Software Engineering Software 40

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

SEPTEMBER 25, 2021

These strange questions came to the fore back in 2014 when Netflix was switching services from CentOS Linux to Ubuntu, and I helped debug several weird performance issues including one I'll describe here. This server is spending about a third of its CPU cycles just checking the time! How long does it take to read the time?

Speed 126

Speed Java AWS Virtualization 126

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 Server According to Bob

JUNE 3, 2016

SQL Server 2016 ‘It Just Runs Faster’ A bold statement that any SQL Server professional can stand behind with confidence. Try SQL Server 2016 Today. The SQL Server Development team tasked several individuals with scalability improvements and real world testing patterns. – [link]. Follow-up.

Hardware 40

Hardware Software Engineering Transportation Scalability 40

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. SVT-AV1 uses parallelization at several stages of the encoding process, which allows it to adapt to the number of available cores including newest servers with significant core count.

Open Source 166

Open Source Scalability Speed Efficiency 166

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. It has 32GB RAM, with 24GB available to the SQL Server 2019 instance. Test Environment. The cost threshold for parallelism is set to 50.

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

SQL Server According to Bob

JUNE 3, 2016

SQL Server 2016 changes the internal design to (CheckScanner), applying no lock semantics and a design similar to those used with In-Memory Optimized (Hekaton) objects, allowing DBCC operations to scale far better than previous releases. Ryan Stonecipher – Principle SQL Server Software Engineer. SQL Server. set nocount on.

Hardware 40

Hardware Cache Servers Software Engineering 40

Brendan Gregg

SEPTEMBER 25, 2021

These strange questions came to the fore back in 2014 when Netflix was switching services from CentOS Linux to Ubuntu, and I helped debug several weird performance issues including one I'll describe here. This server is spending about a third of its CPU cycles just checking the time! How long does it take to read the time?

Speed 40

Speed Java AWS Virtualization 40

Brendan Gregg

SEPTEMBER 25, 2021

These strange questions came to the fore back in 2014 when Netflix was switching services from CentOS Linux to Ubuntu, and I helped debug several weird performance issues including one I'll describe here. This server is spending about a third of its CPU cycles just checking the time! How long does it take to read the time?

Speed 52

Speed Java AWS Virtualization 52

Tim Kadlec

SEPTEMBER 25, 2014

Macbook Air (2014). Macbook Air (2014). Macbook Air (2014). Macbook Air (2014). On powerful devices, like my Macbook Air (2014), parse and execution time was negligible. Another interesting note was how significant the impact of hardware has on the timing. Firefox 31. iPad (4th Gen). That’s a bug.

Latency 41

Latency Google Hardware Servers 41

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.

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. amazon"). I also wrote and published an entertaining SMF manifest that played music.

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) */. It's time in some cgroup paths, but this server is not doing much disk I/O. My search was starting to feel cursed.

Latency 111

Latency Metrics C++ Systems 111

All Things Distributed

APRIL 4, 2017

In 2014 and 2015 respectively, AWS opened offices in Stockholm and Espoo, Finland. After finding it cost prohibitive to use colocation centers in local markets where their users are based, iZettle decided to give up hardware. In making the switch to AWS, WOW air has saved between $30,000 and $45,000 on hardware, and software licensing.

AWS 117

AWS Airlines Latency Games 117