7/11 10:40 - 11:20
Fast by Friday: Making performance analysis fast and easy
It is not ok that we speed weeks, even months, trying to solve why software or hardware is slow. In the meantime, companies waste money on datacenter or cloud compute costs, users are unhappy with latency, and product evaluations can run out of time, leading to poor choices. It should not take more than a week to identify the root cause or causes for a system's poor performance, such that any issue reported on a Monday should be solved by Friday, or sooner. This talk explores a vision called "fast by Friday," a new approach to performance engineering made practical by eBPF superpowers, and explores engineering work we all need to do to make it possible. This involves default tools, compiler, and runtime options to support immediate analysis, and new production diagnosis tools to exonerate components, focusing the target of analysis. This work can also be adopted by SREs, who must solve issues in much shorter time frames, for a similar vision: "Fast by five minutes!"

Intel Fellow
Brendan Gregg
Brendan Gregg is an internationally renowned expert in computing performance and an Intel Fellow. Previously at Netflix, he authored Systems Performance and BPF Performance Tools (Addison-Wesley). He has created widely used tools, methodologies, and visualizations, including flame graphs.