Can I Tune for Performance?

The best thing about performance optimization is that you do not need to know the details of the entire application or system to effectively fix performance problems. Performance optimization requires a complementary set of skills to those of a typical application developer.

You need to be observant and persistent. It takes more of a detective than a programmer to hunt down and eliminate performance problems. It is exhilarating to find and fix these. When you start, performance is terrible. However, you track down the cause, rip it out by the roots, and, if you're lucky, the system then runs twice as fast. Voilà!

To get to the voilà, you must understand the powerful but sometimes confusing world of Linux performance tools. This takes some work, but in the end, it is worth it. The tools can show you aspects of your application and system that you never expected to see.