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Systems Performance, 2nd Edition
book

Systems Performance, 2nd Edition

by Brendan Gregg
December 2020
Intermediate to advanced
928 pages
28h 18m
English
Pearson
Content preview from Systems Performance, 2nd Edition

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 ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780136821694