Systems Performance
by Brendan Gregg · Brendan Gregg
Reference text on analysing operating system and application performance on Linux and Solaris, covering CPUs, memory, file systems, disks, networking and cloud environments. Readers learn methodologies such as USE and workload characterisation, and how to apply observability and benchmarking tools to diagnose bottlenecks.
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More resources on Performance Engineering
highscalability.com
High Scalability is a tech blog offering in-depth articles and real-world case studies on building scalable distributed systems, with content on architecture patterns, performance tuning, scalability challenges, and deployment strategies.
brendangregg.com
Brendan Gregg's site is a comprehensive resource on systems performance engineering, offering tutorials, articles, and open-source tools for profiling, tracing, and analyzing performance (including flame graphs, perf, DTrace, and related techniques).
Performance Engineering of Software Systems (MIT 6.172)
Hands-on, project-based study of building fast, scalable software in C: performance analysis, algorithmic techniques, instruction-level and cache optimizations, and parallel programming. Includes 23 lecture videos, slides, programming projects and exams with solutions, teaching learners to measure and speed up real code.
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Programming Pearls
Jon Bentley's essays, expanded from his Communications of the ACM column, built around real programming problems. Readers learn problem definition, algorithm design, back-of-the-envelope estimation, program verification, and performance tuning through compact, carefully reasoned examples.