Chapter 2
Methodologies
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
Chinese proverb (English equivalent)
I began my tech career as a junior system administrator, and I thought I could learn performance by studying command-line tools and metrics alone. I was wrong. I read man pages from top to bottom and learned the definitions for page faults, context switches, and various other system metrics, but I didn’t know what to do with them: how to move from signals to solutions.
I noticed that, whenever there was a performance issue, the senior system administrators had their own mental procedures for moving quickly through tools and metrics to find the root cause. They understood which metrics ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access