May 2009
Intermediate to advanced
398 pages
11h 5m
English
Content preview from Software Performance and Scalability: A Quantitative Approach
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Chapter 2. Software Platform
Well, it's a very, very exciting time ... and that's where vision is ... | ||
| --Bill Gates | ||
In the simplest sense, software controls what computers do. Since there are an unlimited number of things that computers can do, there are an unlimited number of software programs developed for various kinds of computing tasks. Regardless of the computing tasks, all software programs share some commonalities in how they are created and how they run on computers.
Understanding the performance and scalability of a software system quantitatively requires a good understanding of how a software program is developed inside out. Poorly designed and implemented software will not run fast on fast hardware. Even well-designed software may not perform and scale optimally on fast hardware without going through a full cycle of optimization and tuning for the best possible performance and scalability.
In this chapter, we'll begin with the concept of the software stack, which consists of multiple layers. How each layer performs and scales is critical to the overall performance and scalability of a system as a whole. Then I' 11 elaborate on the concept of application programming interfaces (APIs), which are the building blocks for constructing various software programs. Because of its absolute importance for performance and scalability, multithreading is discussed with the help of a quantitative case study. I'll also categorize different types of software so that we would know our battlefields ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.