The USE Method: Mac OS X Performance Checklist

This is my example USE Method-based performance checklist for the Apple Mac OS X operating system, for identifying common bottlenecks and errors. This draws upon both command line and graphical tools for coverage, focusing where possible on those that are provided with the OS by default, or by Apple (eg, Instruments). Further notes about tools [...]

Posted on September 18, 2013 at 11:37 pm by Brendan Gregg · Permalink · 3 Comments
In: Mac OS X · Tagged with: , , ,

Virtualization Performance: Zones, KVM, Xen

At Joyent we run a high-performance public cloud based on two different virtualization technologies: Zones and KVM. We have historically run Xen as well, but have phased it out for KVM on SmartOS. My job is to make things go fast, which often means using DTrace to analyze the kernel, applications, and those virtualization technologies. [...]

Posted on January 11, 2013 at 3:58 pm by Brendan Gregg · Permalink · Comments Closed
In: Cloud · Tagged with: , , , , ,

Surge 2012: Real-time in the real world

In September, I attended and spoke at the Surge’12 conference in Baltimore. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in performance. The theme with most talks was problems encountered at scale – and as is often the case – you can learn more from failure than success. Bryan and I gave a talk titled “Real-time [...]

Posted on December 6, 2012 at 5:47 pm by Brendan Gregg · Permalink · Comments Closed
In: Performance · Tagged with: , , ,