How to Read This Book

This book is part reference and part story. Readers with some background in performance tuning and analysis may be tempted to immediately flip to a specific section (perhaps one concerning where they suspect a problem to be) and start using the book as a reference. I strongly discourage that.

This Book as a Story

To get the most out of this book, read it first as a story. Habits, ways of thinking, and approaches to problems are some of the most important things you can gain from this text, and these are to be soaked up over the course of hours, not gained by memorizing items from a list.

Many of the topics we'll discuss here may appear quite simple and straightforward. The truth is that they go to the foundations of modern computer architecture -- why computers work at all -- and are often are deceivingly complex. Don't be alarmed if you have to reread parts of the book; it takes time to absorb some of this material.

This Book as a Reference

Once you've read the story and understand the overall picture of how the pieces of the performance puzzle fit together, then this book will prove to be a useful reference. If you haven't read the story, you might look at one of the charts (such as the description of kernel memory tunables in Section 4.2.5.1 in Chapter 4) and think that you've understood the whole picture. If you believe that, there's a lot of complex background that you have just missed out on. After you've read this book as a story, then you'll have an appreciation for the issues surrounding complex problems.