A co-worker introduced me to Craig Hanson and Pat Crain’s performance mantras, which neatly summarize much of what we do in performance analysis and tuning. They are:
Performance mantras
- Don’t do it
- Do it, but don’t do it again
- Do it less
- Do it later
- Do it when they’re not looking
- Do it concurrently
- Do it cheaper
These have inspired me to summarize another performance activity: evaluating benchmark accuracy. Good benchmarking rewards investment in engineering that actually improves performance, but, unfortunately, poor benchmarking is a lot more common. I have spent a lot of my career refuting bad benchmarks, and have developed such a knack for it that prior employers adopted a rule that no benchmark can be published unless approved by me. Because benchmarking is so important for our industry, I’d like to share with you how I do it.
Read more at Brendan Gregg’s Blog
