Name: Systems Performance
ISBN: 9780136820154

alephnerdFeb 2026

Ignore the haters (who sadly have become extremely common on HN now).

I loved your work back when I was an IC, and I'm sure this is a common sentiment across the industry amongst those of us who started systems adjacent! I still refer to your BPF tools and Systems Performance books despite having not written professional code for years now.

Can't wait to read content similar to what you wrote about when at Netflix and Intel albeit about the newer generation of GPUs and ASICs and the newer generation of performance problems!

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kriorDec 2025

> some dude

Maybe you should read something about him before you call him that. I recommend the "Contributions"-section on his Wikipedia-article. And if it is of any relevance to your work: his "Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud" is a comprehensive and excellent guide.

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__turbobrew__Jul 2025

If you like this post, I would recommend “BPF Performance Tools” and “Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud” by Brenden Gregg.

I have pulled out a few miracles using these tools (identifying kernel bottlenecks or profiling programs using ebpf) and it has been well worth the investment to read through the books.

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CoastalCoderNov 2024

Here's some reading that I personally have found helpful for optimizing parallel programs:

The best I've found so far:

https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/paulmck/perfb...

And some other good reading:

https://www.amazon.com/Systems-Performance-Brendan-Gregg/dp/...

https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2014/08/18/atomics-and-content...

https://travisdowns.github.io/blog/2020/07/06/concurrency-co...

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larveAug 2024

I actually find the quality of programming books to have starkly increased in the last decade. I find a lot of manning's and o'reilly's release to have a pretty long shelf-life.

For example, I really enjoyed and often go back to:

- https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/building-event-driven-m...

- https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/designing-data-intensiv...

- https://www.manning.com/books/100-go-mistakes-and-how-to-avo...

- https://www.amazon.com/Systems-Performance-Brendan-Gregg/dp/...

And more recently:

- https://www.manning.com/books/build-a-large-language-model-f...

- https://www.manning.com/books/the-creative-programmer

- https://www.manning.com/books/the-programmers-brain

- https://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Software-Addison-Wesley...

I also find books about specific technologies that indeed run the risk of being deprecated after a few years to be useful too

- https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/networking-and-kubernet...

- https://www.brendangregg.com/bpf-performance-tools-book.html

Furthermore, nothing keeps you from reading books about topics peripheral to computer science, say to keep up with the general vibes:

- https://www.amazon.com/Probabilistic-Machine-Learning-Introd...

- https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Learning-Foundations-Christopher...

- https://www.amazon.com/Joy-Abstraction-Exploration-Category-...

I find that all of these contribute significantly to my growth as an engineer.

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elricAug 2024

The Passionate Programmer is still high up in my list. It's more about ways to get better at software engineering, and less about specific tools or technologies.

Depending on the tech stack you're interested in, I would also strongly suggest reading foundational books that go deep into that platform (e.g. the Java Language Specification if you're into Java [1]). These are not things you necessarily need to read end-to-end or understand completely, but your global understanding of your chosen platform will expand significantly.

Systems Performance by Brendan Gregg is another useful classic. While it's about performance, it touches upon a huge number of important topics (from memory allocation to pretty graphs), perusing it will make you smarter.

[1] https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/

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