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

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. Poor performance has a compound effect on user expectations at an ecosystem level. Live by the link, die by the link.

Performance 124

Performance Network Cache Metrics 124

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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