In September, I attended and spoke at the Surge’12 conference in Baltimore. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in performance. The theme with most talks was problems encountered at scale – and as is often the case – you can learn more from failure than success.
Bryan and I gave a talk titled “Real-time in the real world: DIRT in production”, focusing on problems encountered with data-intensive real-time (DIRT) applications. We talked through a few examples, including TCP connect latency due to dropped SYN packets, disk and file system latency, and memory leaks. Our slides included a couple more examples which we talked through quickly, regarding CPU scheduling. The video and slides are below.