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Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud First Edition

by Brendan Gregg (Author)
4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 158 ratings
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Systems Performance (Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series)
Systems Performance (Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series)
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The Complete Guide to Optimizing Systems Performance

 

Written by the winner of the 2013 LISA Award for Outstanding Achievement in System Administration


Large-scale enterprise, cloud, and virtualized computing systems have introduced serious performance challenges. Now, internationally renowned performance expert Brendan Gregg has brought together proven methodologies, tools, and metrics for analyzing and tuning even the most complex environments. Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud focuses on Linux® and Unix® performance, while illuminating performance issues that are relevant to all operating systems. You&;ll gain deep insight into how systems work and perform, and learn methodologies for analyzing and improving system and application performance. Gregg presents examples from bare-metal systems and virtualized cloud tenants running Linux-based Ubuntu®, Fedora®, CentOS, and the illumos-based Joyent® SmartOS&; and OmniTI OmniOS®. He systematically covers modern systems performance, including the &;traditional&; analysis of CPUs, memory, disks, and networks, and new areas including cloud computing and dynamic tracing. This book also helps you identify and fix the &;unknown unknowns&; of complex performance: bottlenecks that emerge from elements and interactions you were not aware of. The text concludes with a detailed case study, showing how a real cloud customer issue was analyzed from start to finish.

 

Coverage includes

&; Modern performance analysis and tuning: terminology, concepts, models, methods, and techniques

&; Dynamic tracing techniques and tools, including examples of DTrace, SystemTap, and perf

&; Kernel internals: uncovering what the OS is doing

&; Using system observability tools, interfaces, and frameworks

&; Understanding and monitoring application performance

&; Optimizing CPUs: processors, cores, hardware threads, caches, interconnects, and kernel scheduling

&; Memory optimization: virtual memory, paging, swapping, memory architectures, busses, address spaces, and allocators

&; File system I/O, including caching

&; Storage devices/controllers, disk I/O workloads, RAID, and kernel I/O

&; Network-related performance issues: protocols, sockets, interfaces, and physical connections

&; Performance implications of OS and hardware-based virtualization, and new issues encountered with cloud computing

&; Benchmarking: getting accurate results and avoiding common mistakes

 

This guide is indispensable for anyone who operates enterprise or cloud environments: system, network, database, and web admins; developers; and other professionals. For students and others new to optimization, it also provides exercises reflecting Gregg&;s extensive instructional experience.

 

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  1. ISBN-10
    9780133390094
  2. ISBN-13
    978-0133390094
  3. Edition
    First Edition
  4. Publisher
    Pearson
  5. Publication date
    October 16, 2013
  6. Language
    English
  7. Dimensions
    7 x 1.74 x 9.13 inches
  8. Print length
    772 pages
  9. See all details
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Amazon First Reads | Editors' picks at exclusive prices

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Brendan Gregg, lead performance engineer at Joyent, analyzes performance and scalability throughout the software stack. As performance lead and kernel engineer at Sun Microsystems (and later Oracle), his work included developing the ZFS L2ARC, a pioneering file system technology for improving performance using flash memory. He has invented and developed many performance tools, including some that ship with Mac OS X and Oracle® Solaris™ 11. His recent work has included performance visualizations for Linux and illumos kernel analysis. For contributions to system administration, and his work on performance analysis methodologies, he is the recipient of the USENIX 2013 LISA Award for Outstanding Achievement in System Administration. He is also a coauthor of Dtrace: Dynamic Tracing in Oracle Solaris, Mac OS X and FreeBSD (Prentice Hall, 2011),  and Solaris™ Performance and Tools: DTrace and MDB Techniques for Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris, (Prentice Hall, 2007).

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0133390098
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Pearson; First Edition (October 16, 2013)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 772 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780133390094
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0133390094
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.89 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7 x 1.74 x 9.13 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 158 ratings

About the author

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Brendan Gregg

Brendan Gregg

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Brendan Gregg is an industry expert in computing performance and cloud computing. He is a senior performance architect at Netflix, where he does performance design, evaluation, analysis, and tuning. He is the author of multiple technical books including BPF Performance Tools published by Addison Wesley, and Systems Performance published by Prentice Hall. Brendan received the USENIX 2013 LISA Award for Outstanding Achievement in System Administration.

Brendan has created numerous performance analysis tools, which have been included in multiple operating systems. His recent work includes developing methodologies and visualizations for performance analysis, including flame graphs. Born in Australia and later working in the Asia Pacific region, he has lived in the US since 2006.

Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5 stars
158 global ratings

Customers say

Customers find the book awesome for understanding performance and depth. They say it works as a good reference when troubleshooting Linux and applications. Readers also appreciate the breadth and depth of the topics, saying it covers many fields.

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Performance informationDepth
27 customers mention "Performance information"27 positive0 negative

Customers find the book awesome for understanding performance. They say it's an excellent resource and one of the most important technical books they have ever read. Readers mention it explains performance diagnostic best practices and worst practices. They also appreciate the practical coverage of utilities and methods.

"...It provides thorough definitions of terms, explains performance diagnostic Best Practices and "Worst Practices" (called "anti-methods"), and covers..." Read more

"...But, I found it very useful in understanding how to measure and diagnose issues with CPU, memory, storage, and networking...." Read more

"...This book is simply amazing, covering all possible aspects of system performance...." Read more

"I found this to be an excellent resource...." Read more

4 customers mention "Depth"4 positive0 negative

Customers find the book has depth. They appreciate the breadth and variety of topics.

"...The book is well written and I enjoy the breadth and depth of the topics. Each of which is covert from a near beginner to an almost expert level...." Read more

"I spent about one year finishing reading this book. It covers many fields and give you many good tips...." Read more

"Excellent coverage of the topic; a good starting point for those looking for a start in performance engineering...." Read more

"...Very easy read that has layers of depth. It belongs any cloud programer and DevOps shelf." Read more

Top reviews from the United States

Harry J. Foxwell, PhD
5.0 out of 5 stars An outstanding and essential UNIX/Linux performance text!
Reviewed in the United States on November 6, 2013
Verified Purchase
Long ago, the prerequisite UNIX performance book was Adrian Cockcroft's 1994 classic, Sun Performance and Tuning: Sparc & Solaris, later updated in 1998 as Java and the Internet. As Solaris evolved to include the invaluable DTrace observability features, new essential performance references have been published, such as Solaris Performance and Tools: DTrace and MDB Techniques for Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris (2006) by McDougal, Mauro, and Gregg, and DTrace: Dynamic Tracing in Oracle Solaris, Mac OS X and FreeBSD (2011), also by Mauro and Gregg.

Much has occurred in Solaris Land since those books appeared, notably Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems in 2010 and the demise of the OpenSolaris community. But operating system technologies have continued to improve markedly in recent years, driven by stunning advances in multicore processor architecture, virtualization, and the massive scalability requirements of cloud computing.

A new performance reference was needed, and I eagerly waited for something that thoroughly covered modern, distributed computing performance issues from the ground up. Well, there's a new classic now, authored yet again by Brendan Gregg, former Solaris kernel engineer at Sun and now Lead Performance Engineer at Joyent.

Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud is a modern, very comprehensive guide to general system performance principles and practices, as well as a highly detailed reference for specific UNIX and Linux observability tools used to examine and diagnose operating system behaviour. It provides thorough definitions of terms, explains performance diagnostic Best Practices and "Worst Practices" (called "anti-methods"), and covers key observability tools including DTrace, SystemTap, and all the traditional UNIX utilities like vmstat, ps, iostat, and many others.

The book focuses on operating system performance principles and expands on these with respect to Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora, and CentOS are cited), and to Solaris and its derivatives [1]; it is not directed at any one OS so it is extremely useful as a broad performance reference.

The author goes beyond the intricacies of performance analysis and shows how to interpret and visualize statistical information gathered from the observability tools. It's often difficult to extract understanding from voluminous rows of text output, and techniques are provided to assist with summarizing, visualizing, and interpreting the performance data.

Gregg includes myriad useful references from the system performance literature, including a "Who's Who" of contributors to this great body of diagnostic tools and methods.

This outstanding book should be required reading for UNIX and Linux system administrators as well as anyone charged with diagnosing OS performance issues. Moreover, the book can easily serve as a textbook for a graduate level course in operating systems [2].

[1] Solaris 11, of course, and Joyent's SmartOS (developed from OpenSolaris)

[2] Gregg has taught system performance seminars for many years; I have also taught such courses...this book would be perfect for the OS component of an advanced CS curriculum.
13 people found this helpful
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D. Hawthorne
5.0 out of 5 stars Central book for doing Unix Performance analysis and diagnosis
Reviewed in the United States on August 2, 2020
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As expected, this book is primarily for the Linux or Solaris System Administrators. But, I found it very useful in understanding how to measure and diagnose issues with CPU, memory, storage, and networking.

Gregg promotes his USE methodology for investigating performance issues:

Utilisation—how much of a resource is being used?
Saturation—is the resource fully utilised?
Errors—are there errors concerning the resource? Some resource managers fail requests rather than queue them

He provides a whole chapter on how he solved a difficult performance problem through the use of this method.

Gregg also covers benchmarking:

"Benchmarking is surprisingly difficult to do well, with many opportunities for mistakes and oversights."

Gregg is a big fan of dtrace and provides numerous scripts throughout the book, and in the appendix.

I will have to read the book again sometime soon in order to pick more ideas about performance tuning and diagnosis.
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Olivier Bernhard
5.0 out of 5 stars Best book about system performance ever
Reviewed in the United States on October 25, 2013
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I can still remember when i was downloading Brendan Gregg webinars about disk I/Os. It was obvious, this guy knew a lot about it and could explain it in most efficient way. I was just getting frustrated that all this knowledge was not put into a book. A few years later the "precious" is here ! This book is simply amazing, covering all possible aspects of system performance. You will not be overwhelmed : Brendan knows how to find a good balance between over simplification and too much details. You will learn what you really need to know (the internals), the good methods, the right tools. I can't thank enough Brendan Gregg to bring this new master piece i was waiting for so long.

If you're a system administration, a developper, a "true" database administrator trying to understand how your database is likely to interact with the operating system & hardware, here you are. You can't afford to miss this book.
38 people found this helpful
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Joe in Los Angeles
4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book, I've learned a lot from it
Reviewed in the United States on July 12, 2014
Verified Purchase
I found this to be an excellent resource. I've been reading it slowly in my spare time and on plane rides and it's a big book, I'm about half way now.

The book is well written and I enjoy the breadth and depth of the topics. Each of which is covert from a near beginner to an almost expert level. Which is good for me because my understanding of the topics Brendan covers spans the same range, some I've barely heard of others I use almost every week.

He does cover both Linux and Solaris which make some of the procedure descriptions a bit repetititve but we do have a 90-10 split of Linux and Solaris machines and I may get stuck on a Solaris box one of these days.

My only criticism so far is the glossary could be more complete, I would like to have had EVERY acronym he uses in there because of the slow pace, I'm reading I don't remember the ones we don't use. Very common problem.

I'm using it to increase my skills in tracking down performance problems in software I develop and deploy for an international scientific collaboration. Fortunately for me, I haven't had a hard performance problem since I started reading the book, but I'm not sure how quickly I could use such a tome to solve a specific problem. On the other hand I have used many things I've learned to gain a better understanding of things that are working.

I like most of the reviewers so far would recommend it for anyone with even basic skills who is interested in understanding the issues affecting System Performance.

I gave it 4 stars instead of 5 because of how broad an audience it addresses. While that's a good thing in that people can find what they need it also means there is a lot they don't need. Nobody would write a book like this that only had what I need on the topic but I'm saving the 5 star rating for something that knocks my socks off. This is well worth the price if you take the time to not only read it but become familiar with the techniques presented.
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Top reviews from other countries

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Mario Oliva
5.0 out of 5 stars La biblia del Performance
Reviewed in Mexico on February 22, 2020
Verified Purchase
Este libro es una referencia indispensable si trabajas en IT y eres SysAdmin. No es requisito saber programar en el ambiente Linux pero es deseable tener fundamentos de arquitectura del kernel y haber programado en algún lenguage de bajo nivel para sacarle el máximo provecho a todo el material que se presenta.
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Mario Oliva
5.0 out of 5 stars La biblia del Performance
Reviewed in Mexico on February 22, 2020
Este libro es una referencia indispensable si trabajas en IT y eres SysAdmin. No es requisito saber programar en el ambiente Linux pero es deseable tener fundamentos de arquitectura del kernel y haber programado en algún lenguage de bajo nivel para sacarle el máximo provecho a todo el material que se presenta.
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Giscard F. Faria
5.0 out of 5 stars Old, but gold
Reviewed in Brazil on April 9, 2019
Verified Purchase
The book is full of valuable knowledge and experience. Don't get distracted by the fact it is a bit older, it worths the money.
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Yari Latini Corazzini
5.0 out of 5 stars Da leggere e consultare.
Reviewed in Italy on August 15, 2017
Verified Purchase
Lettura utile per chiunque lavori nel settore IT, non solo per chi è interessato al tema delle performance. Da tenere a portata di mano sempre.
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Thierry Turpin
5.0 out of 5 stars Top material for everyone who's involved in performance and Linux administration!
Reviewed in France on May 28, 2018
Verified Purchase
The material covers the details of “why” without being a pure theoretical explanation, very pragmatic.
Books should more be written with such an approach.
Congrats to the author!
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars The best book about performance!!!
Reviewed in Canada on October 23, 2015
Verified Purchase
It's an amazing book. If you're a system administrator, you should read this book!
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