Initially, computer systems performance analyses were carried out primarily because of limited resources. Due to ever increasing functional complexity of computational systems and user requirements, performance engineering continues to play a major role in software development. This book assesses the state of the art in performance engineering. Besides revised chapters drawn from two workshops on performance engineering held in 2000, additional chapters were solicited in order to provide complete coverage of all relevant aspects. The first part is devoted to the relation between software engineering and performance engineering; the second part focuses on the use of models, measures, and tools; finally, case studies with regard to concrete technologies are presented. Researchers, professional software engineers, and advanced students interested in performance analysis will find this book an indispensable source of information and reference.

“If this book had been available to Healthcare.gov’s contractors, and they read and followed its life cycle performance processes, there would not have been the enormous problems apparent in that application. In my 40+ years of experience in building leading-edge products, poor performance is the single most frequent cause of the failure or cancellation of software-intensive projects. This book provides techniques and skills necessary to implement performance engineering at the beginning of a project and manage it throughout the product’s life cycle. I cannot recommend it highly enough.” –Don Shafer, CSDP, Technical Fellow, Athens Group, LLC Poor performance is a frequent cause of software project failure. Performance engineering can be extremely challenging. In Foundations of Software and System Performance Engineering, leading software performance expert Dr. André Bondi helps you create effective performance requirements up front, and then architect, develop, test, and deliver systems that meet them. Drawing on many years of experience at Siemens, AT&T Labs, Bell Laboratories, and two startups, Bondi offers practical guidance for every software stakeholder and development team participant. He shows you how to define and use metrics; plan for diverse workloads; evaluate scalability, capacity, and responsiveness; and test both individual components and entire systems. Throughout, Bondi helps you link performance engineering with everything else you do in the software life cycle, so you can achieve the right performance–now and in the future–at lower cost and with less pain. This guide will help you • Mitigate the business and engineering risk associated with poor system performance • Specify system performance requirements in business and engineering terms • Identify metrics for comparing performance requirements with actual performance • Verify the accuracy of measurements • Use simple mathematical models to make predictions, plan performance tests, and anticipate the impact of changes to the system or the load placed upon it • Avoid common performance and scalability mistakes • Clarify business and engineering needs to be satisfied by given levels of throughput and response time • Incorporate performance engineering into agile processes • Help stakeholders of a system make better performance-related decisions • Manage stakeholders’ expectations about system performance throughout the software life cycle, and deliver a software product with quality performance André B. Bondi is a senior staff engineer at Siemens Corp., Corporate Technologies in Princeton, New Jersey. His specialties include performance requirements, performance analysis, modeling, simulation, and testing. Bondi has applied his industrial and academic experience to the solution of performance issues in many problem domains. In addition to holding a doctorate in computer science and a master’s in statistics, he is a Certified Scrum Master.

Praise from the Reviewers: "The practicality of the subject in a real-world situation distinguishes this book from others available on the market." —Professor Behrouz Far, University of Calgary "This book could replace the computer organization texts now in use that every CS and CpE student must take. . . . It is much needed, well written, and thoughtful." —Professor Larry Bernstein, Stevens Institute of Technology A distinctive, educational text onsoftware performance and scalability This is the first book to take a quantitative approach to the subject of software performance and scalability. It brings together three unique perspectives to demonstrate how your products can be optimized and tuned for the best possible performance and scalability: The Basics—introduces the computer hardware and software architectures that predetermine the performance and scalability of a software product as well as the principles of measuring the performance and scalability of a software product Queuing Theory—helps you learn the performance laws and queuing models for interpreting the underlying physics behind software performance and scalability, supplemented with ready-to-apply techniques for improving the performance and scalability of a software system API Profiling—shows you how to design more efficient algorithms and achieve optimized performance and scalability, aided by adopting an API profiling framework (perfBasic) built on the concept of a performance map for drilling down performance root causes at the API level Software Performance and Scalability gives you a specialized skill set that will enable you to design and build performance into your products with immediate, measurable improvements. Complemented with real-world case studies, it is an indispensable resource for software developers, quality and performance assurance engineers, architects, and managers. It is anideal text for university courses related to computer and software performance evaluation and can also be used to supplement a course in computer organization or in queuing theory for upper-division and graduate computer science students.

Practical, real-world solutions are given to potential problems covering the entire system life cycle. This book describes how to map real-life systems (databases, data centers, and e-commerce applications) into analytic performance models. The authors elaborate upon these models and use them to help the reader better understand performance issues.

Systems Performance, Second Edition, covers concepts, strategy, tools, and tuning for operating systems and applications, using Linux-based operating systems as the primary example. A deep understanding of these tools and techniques is critical for developers today. Implementing the strategies described in this thoroughly revised and updated edition can lead to a better end-user experience and lower costs, especially for cloud computing environments that charge by the OS instance. Systems performance expert and best-selling author Brendan Gregg summarizes relevant operating system, hardware, and application theory to quickly get professionals up to speed even if they have never analyzed performance before. Gregg then provides in-depth explanations of the latest tools and techniques, including extended BPF, and shows how to get the most out of cloud, web, and large-scale enterprise systems. Key topics covered include Hardware, kernel, and application internals, and how they perform Methodologies for rapid performance analysis of complex systems Optimizing CPU, memory, file system, disk, and networking usage Sophisticated profiling and tracing with perf, Ftrace, and BPF (BCC and bpftrace) Performance challenges associated with cloud computing hypervisors Benchmarking more effectively Featuring up-to-date coverage of Linux operating systems and environments, Systems Performance, Second Edition, also addresses issues that apply to any computer system. The book will be a go-to reference for many years to come and, like the first edition, required reading at leading tech companies. Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.

High-performance multiprocessor computers provide new and interesting opportunities to solve large-scale structural engineering problems. However, the development of new computational models and algorithms that exploit the unique architecture of these machines remains a challenge. High Performance Computing in Structural Engineering explores the use of supercomputers with vectorization and parallel processing capabilities in structural engineering applications. The book focuses on the optimization of large structures subjected to the complicated, implicit, and discontinuous constraints of commonly used design codes and presents robust parallel-algorithms for analysis of these structures. The authors apply the algorithms to and analyze the performance of minimum weight designs of large, steel space trusses and moment-resisting frames, with or without bracings, consisting of discrete standard shapes. They clearly show that adroit and judicious use of vectorization techniques can improved the speedup of an optimization algorithm, and that parallel processing can lead to even further speedup. With its review of the necessary background material, generous illustrations, and unique content, this is the definitive resource for the analysis and optimization of structure on shared-memory multiprocessor computers. By extension, High Performance Computing in Structural Engineering will prove equally valuable in distributed computing on a cluster of workstations

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(R) and Unix(R) 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(R), Fedora(R), CentOS, and the illumos-based Joyent(R) SmartOS(TM) and OmniTI OmniOS(R). 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.