[moggi]

If you want to learn how to understand the performance of the whole system I can recommend Brendan Gregg's Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud (https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2020-07-15/systems-perform...). It is a good book that teaches a lot of basics and techniques and gives a good understanding of the impact different system components can have on performance.

[Agentlien]

I am so fascinated by how differently people interpreted this thread, really shows the diversity of computing and performance work. Here's a book about performance in the context of "enterprise and the cloud".

I've worked with performance optimizations for years, but never touched a network connection. Because for me it's all in the context of optimizing single player video games, which primarily leads to a focus on graphics programming and GPU performance.

[lukan]

"I am so fascinated by how differently people interpreted this thread, really shows the diversity of computing and performance work."

Well yeah, my first reaction to the question was: Optimize for what?

The question probably would have benefited from a bit more details about his job. Plattform, domain, etc.

I am also in the same boat as you, where I have 16 ms to do everything. So some of the general things we optimize for, also apply elsewhere, but many others not so much.

My main generic advice would be: things that happen only sometimes, can usually be slow, but things you need to do often ("hot spots") they need attention.

But of course this does not apply to a programm that checks for example whether the airbag of the car needs to fire, because some very rare condition was met. This code only runs very rarely - but if it does, there should be no garbage collector kicking in at that moment, no slow DB lookup, no waiting for a UI process to finish or alike (which should not have a connection anyway to the critical parts).

[namaria]

Seconded. Great material, super well explained. Very detailed, no-non sense.