Software Performance: A Shape Not a Number

on YouTube ↗32m

" summary

Claim: measure latency as a shape not a number, using unsampled histograms instead of averages or lone percentiles. The talk shows Lightstep-style distributed tracing tied to histograms, a real incident with a 17.7 seconds 99th-percentile request, a critical-path finding that slow listing (not reads) and decompression/unmarshal contention cause the delay, and experiments where dropping buckets from 200 to 40 destroys signal. It stresses freshness (~tens of seconds), multi-day horizon, and handling high cardinality to triage real microservice modes.

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" chapters (6)

1. 0:00Introduction and goals
2. 2:11Measuring system performance
3. 11:21Dimensions and cardinality
4. 18:02Debugging and magic
5. 21:07Refining search space
6. 29:56Conclusion and scorecard

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