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Notice board at Ericsson, Stockholm (pic by DeirdreS) Many of us have worked with them: the engineering jerk who is brilliant at what they do, but treats others like trash. Some companies have a policy not to hire them (e.g., Netflix's "No Brilliant Jerks", which was one of the many reasons I joined the company). Th...

When you have an outage caused by a performance issue, you don't want to lose precious time just to install the tools needed to diagnose it. Here is a list of "crisis tools" I recommend installing on your Linux servers by default (if they aren't already), along with the (Ubuntu) package names that they come from: Pa...

Sometimes debuggers and profilers are obivously broken, sometimes it's subtle and hard to spot. From my flame graphs page: CPU flame graph (partly broken) (Click for original SVG.) This is pretty common and usually goes unnoticed as the flame graph looks ok at first glance. But there are 15% of samples on the left, ...

eBPF is a crazy technology – like putting JavaScript into the Linux kernel – and getting it accepted had so far been an untold story of strategy and ingenuity. The eBPF documentary, published late last year, tells this story by interviewing key players from 2014 including myself, and touches on new developments incl...

eBPF is a crazy technology – like putting JavaScript into the Linux kernel – and getting it accepted had so far been an untold story of strategy and ingenuity. The eBPF documentary, published late last year, tells this story by interviewing key players from 2014 including myself, and touches on new developments incl...

This is the story of the most unbelievable demo I've been given in world of open source. You can't make this stuff up. It was 2005, and I felt like I was in the eye of a hurricane. I was an independent performance consultant and Sun Microsystems had just released DTrace, a tool that could instrument all software. Th...

What does the cloud look like? As a customer, you may have thousands of instances running a variety of applications. As a cloud provider, you may have thousands of customers, running everything imaginable. A process colony graph, or "ptree graph", is a way to visualize your live application environment, based on bas...