Customer Reviews

The Practical Performance Analyst

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If understanding and managing computer systems performance is in your job description and you can only buy two books, this is one of the two (the other is Raj Jain's, "The Art of Computer Systems Performance..."). Neil Gunther's book is not just another tome on queueing theory. Immediately useful methods and formulas are presented in the context of real problems. The two chapters on instability in systems and scaling of multiprocessor systems alone make the book worth its price. Readers need to know that there is some math in the book (there is just no escaping it) and that some of the cited vendor products are becoming dated. The Web site associated with the book contains many items of current interest, an errata sheet correcting minor errors in the book, and downloadable programs related to performance evaluation.

Although this book's full value will be realized if you understand the C programming language (he uses source code it illustrate points throughout the book and provides a C library for performance analysis on the accompanying disk), anyone with good math skills will gain much from this outstanding book.

The core approach is Performance By Design, which is aligned to product development. His approach, if used properly, will ensure that performance goals are established in the design phase, and are met as a system or software evolves through the development life cycle.

Highlights of the book are:
(1) Through introduction to the foundation of performance: queuing, parallelism and multiprocessor systems.
(2) Coverage of contemporary issues, such as client/server and web system performance,
(3) Unexpected forays into performance characteristics and considerations that I've encountered in no other book. For example, Part 3 of this book addresses subtle issues such as transient analysis, scaling behavior and similar topics. Here the author integrates theoretical physics into performance analysis - while this may seem odd, it only reinforces that much can be added to the performance analysis body of knowledge by drawing from sources outside of computer science. His qualifications for this material includes a Ph.D in theoretical physics, and his ability to clearly explain concepts that are foreign to the average computer scientist or performance practitioner is excellent.

I like the conversation style that the author employs, the way he starts with the basics and builds upon them and the thoroughness in which all aspects of performance are discussed. More importantly, although advanced math concepts are introduced the way they are presented can be understood by anyone with high school or college freshman knowledge of probability and calculus.

The book is well written and "user friendly". As Dr. Gunther said during a class I recently attended which is based on this book, "You will not look at performance analysis the same after taking class." -- or reading the book. He was correct ... I don't. My views have changed for the better.

The only mark against the book I have is it doesn't have an example section (with answers for each example as an appendix) at the end of each chapter to help people apply the concepts they learned reading the chapter.

Very readable and highly useful book. One major hit. It is ironic that the author complains about the symbols in other books. For queueing he invents his own, instead of sticking with standard practices. This is very fustrating to readers that have other books on queueing and need to compare.

Excellent insight into the capacity planning process and how it relates to distributed computing. This book works best when coupled with the "Guerrilla Capacity Planning" and "Analyzing Computer System Performance with Perl::PDQ" books by Dr. Gunther. He explores queuing theory in-depth and explains how you relate this to real-world capacity planning.

His writing style is easy to understand - not only does he give you the theoretical background, he shows the practical application and the results. He also includes code examples for the "PDQ" analyzer which is a software program he wrote which leverages his "Universal Law of Scalability." For more information, check out his web site at www.perfdynamics.com.

I highly recommend this book if you are a capacity or performance analyst and are interested in real-world application rather than just another boring queuing theory textbook.

The author provides good practical coverage of queuing concepts and then goes on to show how to use queuing models.

I found it interesting that he gives an example of typical computer time periods scaled up to human proportions. If a computer clock speed in nanoseconds were analagous to seconds then a main memory access of 100 cpu cycles would be like some minutes and a disk access would be like some months.

His coverage of queuing concepts is very accessible with a minimum of math.

Scalability is frequently discussed concept that often is not very well quantified. He has the most original approach to quantifying scalability that I have seen.

A queuing modeling package called PDQ is also provided with the book. The source code in C is provided for the PDQ package.
There are some PDQ examples within the book. This is a real bargain because certainly the PDQ software is worth much more than the cost of the book.

If you have and interest in capacity planning and performance analysis (especially if you work in this area) this is a must have book.