Bryan Cantrill - The Hurricane's Butterfly: Debugging Pathologically Performing Systems

[jpasztor-oi]

speaker: Bryan Cantrill
topic: The Hurricane's Butterfly: Debugging Pathologically Performing Systems
video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AO4wz6gI3Q
length: 1:06:49

Despite significant advances in tooling over the past two decades, performance debugging—finding and rectifying those limiters to systems performance—remains a singular challenge in our production systems. This challenge persists in part because of a butterfly effect in complicated systems: small but ill-behaving components can have an outsized effect on the performance of a system in aggregate.

This talk explores this challenge, including why simple problems can cause non-linear performance effects, how they can remain so elusive and what we can do to better debug them.