Reddit reviews Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud

Great write-up.

On a side note, I have found the book "Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud" by Brendan Gregg extremely useful for tuning the Performance.

Just subscribe to his blog and then buy this. Probably the best book out there on system performance in recent years.

Glances is a very nice example of a good python code base and project structure. An excellent demonstration of the a "proper" way to package a standalone python application. https://github.com/nicolargo/glances

It does, as the name suggest, only provide a "glance" into how the system is doing. For a deeper dive in monitoring check out Brendan Gregg's posts and guides,
http://www.brendangregg.com/index.html .

He also has a book which I consider one of the most up to date and best on the topic of monitoring: https://www.amazon.com/Systems-Performance-Enterprise-Brendan-Gregg/dp/0133390098

You may want to study this book: "Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud" by Brendan Gregg http://www.amazon.com/Systems-Performance-Enterprise-Brendan-Gregg/dp/0133390098/

Lol, im sorry man (or woman), but you're gonna have a tough time getting specific answers to extremely vague questions, let alone enough detail here to write an actual research paper. No offense.

I'm not sure if you're in college/university, or high-school and want to just get into IT, but this is a profession of specifics, but you should know now that all manner of it engineering disciplines, whether it's systems, network, or software, all deal in specificity.

There are literally hundreds of tools used and thousands of technical documents (publicly available, look up RFC papers) that cover this. If you want one good recommendation, it would probably be:

Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud https://www.amazon.com/dp/0133390098/

I have it on my desk at work and I work as an SRE for a large SaaS company (not gloating, just to let you I'm not just spewing nonsense). It's mostly focused on *nix systems but touches on Windows stuff a bit as well. For windows, you can look up the SysInternals Suite of tools they have available for free. It gives all the info necessary to monitor a hosts various stats, including processes trees, Cpu, gpu, mem, and disk i/o, including paging, dll handles, tcp connections, etc.

I'm not trying to be a dick here, but this isn't really the type of thing you can gloss through a Wikipedia article and write a full-blown research paper on in a night (unless it consists mostly of citations from other white papers). People literally spend their entire professional career learning this, it can't be learned in a cpl days. That being said, if it's for high-school or somewhere it won't be scrutinized too harshly, you can probably use a kindle, or the online version of the book I referenced above, and skim through it. It's pretty thorough, and if I had to pick one reference, that would be it.

Cheers!

To demonstrate the differences in the time scales for this, the table shows the average time that each operation takes, scaled to an imaginary system where the CPU cycle of a 3 GHz processor is scaled to take 1 second.

Event | Latency | Scaled
-----|-------|------
1 CPU Cycle | 0.3 ns | 1 s
Level 1 CPU Cache Access | 0.9 ns | 3 s
Level 2 CPU Cache Access | 2.8 ns | 9 s
Level 3 CPU Cache Access | 12.9 ns | 43 s
Main memory access (DRAM from CPU) | 120 ns | 6 min
Solid-state disk IO (flash memory) | 50-150 us | 2 - 6 days
Rotational disk IO | 1 - 10 ms | 1 - 12 months
Internet: San Francisco to New York | 40 ms | 4 years
Internet: San Francisco to UK | 80 ms | 8 years
Internet: San Francisco to Australia | 183 ms | 19 years
TCP packet retransmit | 1 - 3 s | 105-317 years
OS virtualisation system reboot | 4 s | 423 years
SCSI command time-out | 30 s | 3 millennia
Hardware virtualisation system reboot | 40 s | 4 millennia
Physical system reboot | 5 m | 32 millennia

Source

Clean Code

Systems Performance

I think brendan gregg books are the top, but u need some basis to understand (processor, memory etc)

https://www.amazon.fr/Gregg-System-Performance-Ent-Clo_p1/dp/0133390098

A few of my favorite books I reference and recommend. Just a note, many of these are older and can be purchased used for much less. Also if you can afford it, get a Safari subscription. I use my work Safari subscription but this alone has saved me from my book buying habit. Now I only buy "must have" books. :)

Official Ubuntu Server book - I really like this book as the writing style helped me "get it" with Linux. Kyle Rankin has a very good method of showing you the technology and then a quick run down to get the server working, followed by some admin tips. It's a just scratching the surface type of book but it's enough to get you started. I rarely use Ubuntu now, but this book helped me understand DNS and other topics that were IMHO harder to grasp from other books.

As a bonus, this book also has an entire chapter dedicated to troubleshooting. While this sounds obvious, it's a great read as it talks about dividing the problem, how to approach the facts, etc. Stuff a seasoned admin would know but might be hard to explain to a new admin.

The Linux Command Line: A Complete Introduction - You can read this book for free on the site, but having a paper copy is nice. As mentioned, you should have a very solid understanding of the command line. In my experience, I have seen co-workers struggle with basic shell scripting and even understanding how to make a single line for loop. This book covers the basics, moving to shell scripting and I think it's a good solid reference guide as well.

DevOps Troubleshooting: Linux Server Best Practices - This book is referenced a few times here but I'll throw another comment for it. Another book from Kyle Rankin and has the same straight to the point writing style. It's very quick reference and simple enough that you could give this to a new sysadmin and he or she could get started with some of the basic tools. While the book covers a good selection of basic services and tools, it's easy to get deeper into a chapter and find it's only discussing a handful of troubleshooting steps. The idea with this book is it's a quick reference guide, and if you want to get deeper into troubleshooting or performance, take a look at other books on the market. Either way, this is a great book I keep on my desk or reference through Safari.

UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook (4th Edition) - Another popular book based on the comments here. This is a pretty big book, thin pages, but it's like a small brick of UNIX/Linux knowledge. While it's starting to get dated, it does give a great reference to many topics in the system administration world. The chapters can dive deep into the subject and offer more than enough information to get started but also understand the technology. The e-mail chapter I thought was great as well as the DNS. I think of this book as a overall guide and if I want to know more, I would read a book just on the subject, that's if I need more information. One thing to point out is this book makes use of different OS's so it's filled with references to Solaris, different UNIX versions, etc. Not a problem but just keep in mind the author may be talking about something outside the scope of vanilla Linux.

Shell Scripting: Expert Recipes for Linux, Bash and more - I found this book to be a good extenstion of the Linux Command Line book, but there are many many other Bash/Shell scripting books out there. The author has many of the topics discussed on his site but the book is a good reference for scripting. I can't stress enough how important shell scripting is. While it's good to know a more formal language like Python/Perl/etc, you are almost certain bash will be on the machine you are working on.

Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud - I can't comment on this book beyond the first chapter, I'm still reading it now but it's reading similar to Brendan Gregg's site, and that's a great thing. If you don't know who this guy is, he's one of the top performance guys in the Solaris and now Linux world. He has some great infographics on his site, which I use for reference.

Use method for Linux

Linux Performance

Example of Linux performance monitoring tools

Hope this helps!

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0133390098/

I few years ago my youngest brother got his first IT job, and he fell right into an admin role. He too is very sharp. I bought him the following books as a gift to get him started...

The Practice of System and Network Administration, SecondEdition - a few years old but has lots of fundamentals in there, still well worth reading. Hoping for a third edition someday.

Tom Limoncelli's Time Management for System Administrators

I see others have recommended this great book, and I wholehartedly agree: UNIX and Linux System Adminstration, 4th Edition. I was sad when Evi's ship was lost at sea last year. :-( You could tell she loved sailing old wooden ships... just look at the cover. A great loss; she did so much for our community.

Additionally, I will second or third anyone recommending works by Brendan Gregg. I got the Kindle version of Brendan's Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud. I really like this book. It was written to be a good foundational book for the next several years. I am planning to get a hard copy version too. While you're at it, check out these links...

Brendan Gregg:
http://www.brendangregg.com/
http://www.brendangregg.com/linuxperf.html
https://github.com/brendangregg/perf-tools
http://lwn.net/Articles/608497/
http://www.brendangregg.com/USEmethod/use-linux.html

Tom Limoncelli:
http://everythingsysadmin.com/

Introduce him not only to books, but online resources and communities like /r/linuxadmin :-)

Cheers!

Systems Performance - Brendan Gregg


Knowledge of how Apache works, of how MySQL works, of what dhcp does on the wire: all this is good knowledge. But a more fundamental skill is troubleshooting. Troubleshooting is having an idea how something is supposed to work, tracing where it’s misbehaving and then fixing it. I suggest, for any admin, reinforce your ability to troubleshoot.

Performance tuning isn’t always necessary. On an over-provisioned system, you don’t care; just let it run and do its job. But where the study of performance tuning comes in handy is that it’s the systematic troubleshooting of systems. We measured something. Is this what we expect; why or why not? Are we really measuring what we think we’re measuring; how do we validate? What’s the system doing on the inside; how do we find out? What’s impeding this system from operating faster/better; why?

I advocate systems performance, because I think it reinforces troubleshooting. I advocate troubleshooting, because it’s the top-down, fix-my-need now, universal and adaptable approach. In this world of on-the-job training and with new technologies every six months, it’s how to approach new systems and new problems without having to start on page one of the manual every time.