Performance Analysis and Tuning on Modern CPUs

Performance Analysis and Tuning on Modern CPUs - Denis Bakhvalov

This is the first edition, the second edition of this book is available.

We live in an increasingly data-centric world, where we generate enormous amounts of data each day. The growth of information exchange fuels the need for both faster software and faster hardware. Unfortunately, modern CPUs are not enjoying big improvements in single-core performance as they used to in the past decades.

That's why performance tuning is becoming more important than it has been for the last 40 years. According to the popular paper "There’s plenty of room at the top" by Leiserson et al., SW tuning will be one of the key drivers for performance gains in the near future. We, as SW developers, must start optimizing the code of our applications.

I started this book with a simple goal: educate software developers to better understand their applications' performance on modern hardware. I know how confusing this topic might be for a beginner or even for an experienced developer. I remember the days when I was starting with performance analysis. I was gazing at unfamiliar metrics trying to match the data that didn't match. And I was baffled. It took me years until it finally "clicked", and all pieces of the puzzle came together. At the time, the only good sources of information were software developer manuals, which are not what mainstream developers like to read. So I decided to write this book, which will hopefully make it easier for developers to learn performance analysis and tuning concepts.