Name: The Every Computer Performance Book
ISBN: 9781482657753

The Every Computer Performance Book

This is a short, occasionally funny, book covers the four main tools of performance work: Performance Monitoring, Capacity Planning, Load Testing, and Modeling. For a performance book, this one has several unique features. It works for any collection of computers you have. It teaches you how to use whatever meters they give you and how to discover more about those meters than the documentation reveals. It only requires the most simple math on your part, yet it allows you to easily use some fairly advanced techniques to do important work quickly. It is full of practical advice from someone that has been there and done good work on live systems and websites all over the world. It is buzzword free and written in a clear, conversational style.

What Hacker News says

bewuethrMar 2024

There's The Every Computer Performance Book http://www.treewhimsy.com/TECPB/Book.html and the blog it's based on, https://rwwescott.wordpress.com/

thread

larveAug 2022

I own many more books than I will ever read. I also own many books where I have read maybe 2 chapters, usually the first two but not always. Of course, I could download them as PDF, or put them in my wishlist, or keep endless lists of interesting books in my knowledge base, and I do, but the result is very different.

1. the actual physicality of the book ensures that I will not forget it. It is literally there on the shelf. 2. I used to LOVE libraries as a kid. As an adult with a very specific set of interests (computers, ecology, typography), I am usually frustrated by the selection available. What I have now is basically my ideal library, right here at home, and no one is going to bug me about writing inside the books or returning them late. The selection is vast and carefully curated, and I am guaranteed to come out of it delighted when I decide to borrow a few books.

Because of that, I also print out and ring-bind a huge amount of PDFs and articles and "in-between" books, to be able to put them up on shelves too.

For example, I wanted the other day to do some writing about the fundamentals of software performance, and I gathered the following books, which I plucked for the stuff I needed:

- computer systems - bryant & o'hallaron

- bpf performance tools - gregg

- systems performance - gregg

- every computer performance book - wescott

- sql performance explained - winand

- computer organization and design - hennessy, patterson

- computer architecture - hennessy, patterson

- algorithms - sedgewick

- understanding software dynamics - sites

- design of data intensive applications - kleppman

- graphics programming black book - abrash (why not!)

There is no way a public library would have them all in stock. I also would have had to go there, carry the books back or study on site.

all of these books had various amounts of marginalia, folded corners, printouts of papers laid in. This physicality gives me a lot of context information. I often do the same kind of "study session" with PDFs, and it's not hard to find "library" sites online, but it feels much less "intentional" to me.

edit: It's probably also an education thing. My grandfather was an art scholar and my uncle an accomplished lawyer. They each wrote many books and articles, and both had gigantic libraries of unread books they would pick from when writing. I grew up with my grandfather at the kitchen table with a stack of books and his boxes of index cards, staring at us kids to please shut up. There is an undertone of nostalgia realizing that this is what I do too now, 30 years later, when both have sadly passed. Their libraries however remain, in the case of my grandfather, turned into a research library in Paris.

(edit: formatting, family anecdote) Also, it's just fun.

thread