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.

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.

Written with computer scientists and engineers in mind, this book brings queueing theory decisively back to computer science.

The Performance of Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) Systems: Analysis, Measurement, and Assessment offers a unique overview of the information on the state-of-the-art of analysis, measurement, and assessment of the performance of concentrated solar power (CSP) components and systems in a comprehensive, compact, and complete manner. Following an introductory chapter to CSP systems and the fundamental principles of performance assessment, individual chapters explore the component performance of mirrors and receivers. Further expert-written chapters look at system performance assessment, durability testing, and solar resource forecasting for CSP systems. A final chapter gives an outlook on the actual methods and instruments for performance and durability assessment that are underdevelopment. The Performance of Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) Systems: Analysis, Measurement, and Assessment is an essential reference text for research and development professionals and engineers working on concentrated solar power systems, as well as for postgraduate students studying CSP. - Presents a unique, single literature source for a complete overview of the performance assessment tools and methods currently used for concentrated solar power (CSP) technology - Written by a team of experts in the field of CSP - Provides information on the state-of-the-art of modeling, measurement, and assessment of the performance of CSP components and systems in a comprehensive, compact, and complete manner

Running a productive agriculture system has always been about having the right tools and the know-how to pursue optimization and efficiency. In the 21st century, the case can be made that the agriculturist's most important tool is not the cultivator, but the computer. While you still need to know how to adapt to the day-to-day challenges of land an

The Performance of Photovoltaic (PV) Systems: Modelling, Measurement and Assessment explores the system lifetime of a PV system and the energy output of the system over that lifetime. The book concentrates on the prediction, measurement, and assessment of the performance of PV systems, allowing the reader to obtain a thorough understanding of the performance issues and progress that has been made in optimizing system performance. - Provides unique insights into the performance of photovoltaic systems - Includes comprehensive and systematic coverage of a fascinating area in energy - Written by an expert team of authors and a respected editor