Brendan Gregg

JULY 4, 2021

It's an exciting time for developments in computer performance, not just for the BPF technology (which I often [write about]) but also for processors with 3D stacking and cloud vendor CPUs (e.g., 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

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. SQL Server asks the CPU if it supports SSE or AVX in order to determine the level of hardware support present on the system. My recent posts. have generated discussions about the SSE and AVX support boundaries.

Servers 40

Servers Hardware Software Engineering Software 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. The DBCC CheckDB demonstration loads a table and demonstrates the performance improvement.

Hardware 40

Hardware Cache Servers Software Engineering 40

Brendan Gregg

FEBRUARY 28, 2023

At USENIX SREcon22 APAC I gave the opening keynote on the future of computer performance, rounding up the latest developments and making predictions of where I see things heading. This talk originated from my updates to Systems Performance 2nd Edition , and this was the first time I've given this talk in person!

Performance 52

Performance Latency Cache Virtualization 52

Alex Podelko

OCTOBER 20, 2016

I am looking forward to share my thoughts on ‘Reinventing Performance Testing’ at the imPACt performance and capacity conference by CMG held on November 7-10, 2016 in La Jolla, CA. Cloud seriously impacts system architectures that has a lot of performance-related consequences. – Cloud. – Agile.

Performance Testing 100

Performance Testing Architecture Testing Performance 100

John McCalpin

OCTOBER 16, 2016

“Memory Bandwidth and System Balance in HPC Systems” If you are planning to attend the SuperComputing 2016 conference in Salt Lake City next month, be sure to reserve a spot on your calendar for my talk on Wednesday afternoon (4:15pm-5:00pm).

Architecture 40

Architecture Systems Technology Technology 40

Dynatrace

AUGUST 10, 2019

Having the ability to monitor the performance and availability of your organization’s internal applications—in addition to your organization’s customer-facing applications—from within your corporate network is an important benefit of synthetic monitoring. Windows 2016 Server (or a supported Linux distribution ).

Monitoring 103

Monitoring Hardware Tuning Mobile 103

ACM Sigarch

APRIL 26, 2018

TFLOPS deep learning performance, and is equipped with 32GB of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) capacity. The new DGX-2, which achieves 2 petaFLOPS in the system, combines 16 fully interconnected GPUS with 10x the deep learning performance. HPU: Holographic Processing Unit (HPU) is the specific hardware of Microsoft’s Hololens.

Hardware 99

Hardware Artificial Intelligence Architecture Google 99

Tim Kadlec

JANUARY 9, 2019

One question I’ve seen posed a few times in the past several months is whether performance really is a moral or ethical concern, or if that’s all heavy-handed exaggeration. When you stop to consider all the implications of poor performance, it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that poor performance is an ethical issue.

Performance 111

Performance Energy Internet Internet 111

Dynatrace

OCTOBER 28, 2021

As software performance degrades or fails, the chaos engineers’ findings enable developers to add resiliency into the code, so the application remains intact in an emergency. Chaos engineering matured at organizations such as Netflix, and gave rise to technologies such as Gremlin (2016) , becoming more targeted and knowledge-based.

Engineering 225

Engineering Entertainment Cloud Infrastructure 225

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

Dynatrace

JUNE 7, 2019

We continue to grow our public synthetic monitoring locations, but customers using Dynatrace Synthetic still need to monitor the performance and availability of internal web applications. Now, you’ll be able to: Measure internal web page performance and availability with single-URL monitors. Scalability and load balancing.

Network 156

Network Monitoring Servers Hardware 156

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.

Virtualization 111

Virtualization AWS Hardware Storage 111

SQL Performance

JUNE 21, 2019

What I find is very similar to backups: No DBCC CHECKDBs performed at all DBCC CHECKDBs being performed only on select databases DBCC CHECKDBs last performed months or years ago. Performing index maintenance by removing fragmentation from your indexes is still important. SQL Server 2016 introduced soft-NUMA nodes.

Servers 49

Servers Azure Hardware Database 49

Percona

AUGUST 18, 2023

Cases where (in very large sharded deployments) a user will install multiple mysqlds per server to reduce contention, i.e., they get more performance per 2-socket server with four or eight mysqlds than one. The original motivation for FB was due to different hardware generations, especially between regions/data centers.

Programming 82

Programming Servers Database Hardware 82

The Morning Paper

MAY 21, 2019

” This paper describes a “far memory” system that has been in production deployment at Google since 2016. Using zswap means that no new hardware solutions are required, enabling rapid deployment across clusters. Enter zswap! Google use zswap to implement their far memory tier.

Software 78

Software Software Google Hardware 78

Alex Russell

OCTOBER 22, 2017

TL;DR: performance budgets are an essential but under-appreciated part of product success and team health. Nobody is trying to do a poor job, and yet the results of a “completed” PWA project often require weeks or months of painstaking rework to deliver minimally acceptable performance. Partner meetings are illuminating.

Performance 68

Performance Benchmarking Network Mobile 68

Smashing Magazine

JANUARY 15, 2019

How Improving Website Performance Can Help Save The Planet. How Improving Website Performance Can Help Save The Planet. Perhaps the biggest win when it comes to making websites more sustainable is that performance, user experience and sustainability are all neatly intertwined. Jack Lenox. 2019-01-15T13:30:32+01:00.

Website Performance 73

Website Performance Website Energy Performance 73

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. In this article, we will look at how this can improve the reporting/analytical query performance in MySQL. Result: ~10x performance gain, no index used. Summary of simple query performance.

Cache 46

Cache C++ AWS Airlines 46

SQL Performance

NOVEMBER 1, 2019

As you may recall, back in SQL Server 2016 SP1, they opened up all of the programming surface features to all editions, and many (but certainly not all) of the performance and availability features. I wrote about this in a post entitled, " A Big Deal : SQL Server 2016 Service Pack 1."

Servers 40

Servers Hardware Database Availability 40

Smashing Magazine

OCTOBER 27, 2021

Nowadays, hardware and software are designed to conduct eye-tracking studies for marketing , UX , psychological and medical research , gaming , and several other use cases. However, the price of eye-tracking used to be much higher than heatmaps, as measuring users’ gaze required special hardware to be used in-lab.

Mobile 111

Mobile Website Hardware Social Media 111

Alex Russell

APRIL 29, 2021

Classics of the genre include: Apple's just focused on performance! The Performance Argument. 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. Steve & Tim's Close-up Magic.

Media 145

Media Games Education Engineering 145

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.

Virtualization 40

Virtualization AWS Hardware Storage 40

Alex Russell

FEBRUARY 21, 2023

Before Safari 15, Apple only delivered two substantial releases per year, a pattern that had been stable since 2016: New features were teased at WWDC in the early summer They landed in a Fall dot-oh release with the new iOS version A second set of feature updates would trickle out as part of a Spring point-one update. But needs must.

Energy 79

Energy Games Engineering Design 79

SQL Server According to Bob

JULY 13, 2016

desktop machine (I won’t tell you the hardware details. Today we are introducing the new Basic Installer experience for SQL Server 2016 Express , SQL Server 2016 Developer , and SQL Server 2016 Evaluation Editions. You also have the option to perform this same action on the main installer screen where it says Custom.

Servers 40

Servers Media Engineering Virtualization 40

Brendan Gregg

SEPTEMBER 5, 2017

LTS (April 2016). I wrote about it in a previous post, [DTrace for Linux 2016]. I wrote a page on it: [perf]. - **eBPF**: tracing features completed in 2016, this provides efficient programmatic tracing to existing kernel frameworks. The hardest part on Linux is now done: kernel support. It's the official profiler.

Virtualization 76

Virtualization AWS Engineering Hardware 76

SQL Server According to Bob

NOVEMBER 29, 2016

Back in June, Bob Dorr gave you the thinking behind why SQL Server 2016 It Just Runs Faster due to changes in our SQL Server and NUMA configurations. Bob blogged about a new SQL Server 2016 feature called Auto Soft NUMA. First, we see a message like this (Note: We made a fix in 2016 SP1 because this used to say 8 logical processors).

Servers 45

Servers Virtualization Scalability Hardware 45

Rigor

MARCH 20, 2018

I wrote a blog in 2016 that discussed the need for businesses to flip the traditional monitoring investment pyramid on its head. Instead of focusing on hardware and infrastructure first, technical teams should first ensure that they first have visibility on the thing that drives the business: their customer experience.

Monitoring 40

Monitoring Retail Ecommerce Infrastructure 40

John McCalpin

NOVEMBER 5, 2016

In recent years the trend has been to increase core-level performance by the use of SIMD vector instructions, and to increase package-level performance by the addition of more and more cores. The core does not have enough load bandwidth to perform all of these extra load operations at full speed.

Cache 40

Cache C++ Latency Hardware 40

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. Or did we just get lucky or oblivious?

Programming 79

Programming Hardware Cache Code 79

O'Reilly Software

APRIL 4, 2018

In 2016, Apache Spark introduced Structured Streaming , a new streaming engine based on the SparkSQL abstractions and runtime optimizations. But when we run on a cluster of machines, how can we perform the resource management required by this new generation of distributed data-intensive applications?

Architecture 80

Architecture Scalability Google Operating System 80

SQL Server According to Bob

DECEMBER 18, 2018

Be sure to deploy SQL Server 2017 CU6 or newer for best data durability and performance results. “. The “forced flush” changes in SQL Server avoid flushes, when possible, in order to improve performance on non-optimized Fua file systems. Performance points of reference: The following charts highlight the increase in performance.

Servers 90

Servers Media Cache Storage 90