The Mystery Machine: End-to-end performance analysis of large-scale internet services

The Mystery Machine: End-to-end performance analysis of large-scale internet services - Chow et al. 2014 Google's Dapper paper is very well known, but Facebook's Mystery Machine seems to be much less well known - and that's a shame because I have a hunch the approach could be very relevant to many people. Current debugging and … Continue reading The Mystery Machine: End-to-end performance analysis of large-scale internet services

PerfBlower: Quickly Detecting Memory-Related Performance Problems via Amplification

PerfBlower: Quickly Detecting Memory-Related Performance Problems via Amplification - Fang et al. 2015 Another ECOOP '15 paper, and definitely something with immediate pragmatic utility. PerfBlower finds heap-related performance problems during regular test runs (not exhaustive performance tests) by amplifying the effects of small issues to make them visible. The user provides details of classes of … Continue reading PerfBlower: Quickly Detecting Memory-Related Performance Problems via Amplification

Optimization Coaching for JavaScript

Optimization Coaching for JavaScript - St-Amour & Guo, 2015 Because modern programming languages heavily rely on compiler optimizations for performance, failure to apply certain key optimizations is often the source of performance issues. To diagnose these performance issues, programmers need insight about what happens during the optimization process. Consider the following program snippet from the … Continue reading Optimization Coaching for JavaScript

Making Sense of Performance in Data Analytics Frameworks

Making Sense of Performance in Data Analytics Frameworks - Ousterhout et al. 2015 We all know the causes of poor performance in big data analytics workloads: network I/O, disk I/O, and straggler tasks. Ousterhout et al. set out to try and quantify this, and found that what we think we know isn't necessarily so. Yet … Continue reading Making Sense of Performance in Data Analytics Frameworks