Top 10 - Performance Folklore

Location:

Bayview A/B

Track:

Scalability, Availability, and Performance: Putting It All Together

Time:

Wednesday, 10:30am - 11:20am

Abstract:

Building high-performance systems is tough. Today this is especially tough since a lot of the common wisdom for what makes a system high-performance is misleading at best, and often just plain wrong. This talk aims to expose the myths and folklore commonly found on the web related to building high-performance systems. Martin will cover his updated Top 10 performance myths that even experts building high-performance trading or big data systems fall prey to. Taking an approach of "measure everything" has been an enlightening education into what works, and what doesn't, when trying to achieve high-throughput at low-latencies. This talk highlights the findings of working on systems requiring the extremes of performance and how they truly test any high-performance systems design. Topics covered will include Java, concurrency, operating systems, functional programming, and how hardware really works.

Martin Thompson

Martin is a high-performance and low-latency specialist, with experience gained over two decades working on large scale transactional and big-data systems. He believes in Mechanical Sympathy, i.e. applying an understanding of the hardware to the creation of software as being fundamental to delivering elegant high-performance solutions. The Disruptor framework is just one example of what his mechanical sympathy has created. Martin was the co-founder and CTO of LMAX. He blogs at mechanical-sympathy.blogspot.com, and can be found giving training courses on performance and concurrency, or hacking code to make systems better.