Systems performance is an effective discipline for performance analysis and tuning, and can help you find performance wins for your applications and the kernel. However, most of us are not performance or kernel engineers, and have limited time to study this topic. To serve this need I summarized Linux systems performance in 40 minutes at USENIX LISA 2019, touring six important areas: observability tools, methodologies, benchmarking, profiling, tracing, and tuning.

The video is on youtube:

The slides are on slideshare (or PDF):

The different background colors I used for the screenshots have no meaning: I just got bored of using gray.

I've heard many companies use my Systems Performance book as recommended or required reading for new engineers (thank you), and this is an updated talk on the topic. I've been working on Systems Performance 2nd Edition, now that the BPF book is done.

At LISA I also ran a BPF performance tools workshop with over 200 attendees. It was a little rushed for 90 minutes, but I've heard people found it valuable anyway. At (the rescheduled) USENIX SREcon in June in Santa Clara I'll be running it again in a 3-hour window. So far my workshops have not been video recorded, but in the interests of supporting WFH I hope to get a workshop recorded sometime and put online.