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

Alex Russell

APRIL 29, 2021

As an engineer on a browser team, I'm privy to the blow-by-blow of various performance projects, benchmark fire drills, and the ways performance marketing (deeply) impacts engineering priorities. With each team, benchmarks lost are understood as bugs. Chrome has missed several APIs for 3+ years: Storage Access API.

Media 145

Media Games Education Engineering 145

SQL Performance

APRIL 8, 2019

Back on December 5, 2017, Microsoft announced that they were using AMD EPYC 7551 processors in their storage-optimized Lv2-Series virtual machines. The L3 cache size is 64MB. I wrote about using CPU-Z to benchmark the Intel Xeon E5-2673 v3 processor in an Azure VM in this article. Figure 1: CPU-Z Benchmark Results for LS16v2.

Azure 42

Azure Virtualization Storage Benchmarking 42

Alex Russell

OCTOBER 22, 2017

Budgets are scaled to a benchmark network & device. Deciding what benchmark to use for a performance budget is crucial. Simulated packet loss and variable latency, however, can make benchmarking extremely difficult and slow. The true median device from 2016 sold at about ~$200 unlocked. Global Ground-Truth.

Performance 68

Performance Benchmarking Network Mobile 68