Category: Linux

  • Learning eBPF Review

    What makes Learning eBPF different to BPF Performance tools (which I wrote about recently) is that it moves beyond theObservability and performance lens towards Security and modification behaviour inside the Linux kernel. The author Liz Rice is the Chief Open Source Officer at Isovalent and recently presented at the eBPF Virtual Summit in September of…

  • BPF Performance Tools Review

    BPF Performance Tools Review

    BPF Performance Tools the kind of book an observability specialist picks up and thinks this will make a good reference book for my library, and then reads the whole thing cover to cover. Brendan Gregg formerly of NetFlix has contributed significantly to the world of observability and uses his experience in troubleshooting and tracing some…

  • Performance Diagnostics Part 4 -HTTPS Performance

    Unlike HTTPS, analysing HTTP traffic with tools like Wireshark is pretty easy because everything is in clear text. Wireshark will even give you the request performance (49ms highlighted below). I can also see that the request was sent in packet 4 (after the three way handshake), and the response came in packet 6. The delta…

  • Performance Diagnostics Part 2 — Revenge of the OSI Model

    Continuing on from the previous article where I discussed an amalgamation of performance diagnostics with fat client applications. I thought it was a good time to go back to computer science 101 where we were introduced to the OSI model and the TCP/IP model. Both are models that some architectures and platforms more or less…

  • Performance Diagnostics Part 1

    Over the last 20 years I’ve been sent in by customers to investigate some of the most intriguing application performance problems that have had customers investing in infrastructure, time in war rooms, connectivity to try and resolve a problem that is eluding the technical team, or the technical team is unable to quantify what will…

  • Initial Congestion Windows in Linux

    As part of my research I’ve spent a lot of time looking the performance of TCP variants and options. One of the most common questions I get asked is about the congestion window and how it reacts to change in the environment. The congestion window (CWND) is used to control how many segments (layer 4…