Every Computer Performance Book: How to Avoid and Solve Performance Problems on The Computers You Work With

This is a short, occasionally funny, book on how to solve and avoid application and/or computer performance problems. I wrote it to give back the knowledge, insights, tips, and tricks I was given over the last 25 years of my computing career. It shows practical ways to use key performance laws and gives well tested advice on how (and when) to do performance monitoring, capacity planning, load testing, and performance modeling. It works for any application or collection of computers because it teaches you how to decipher whatever meters they give you and how to discover more about those meters than the documentation reveals. This book covers the things that will always be true no matter what technology you are using. It will continue to be useful 20 years from now when today’s technology, if it runs at all, will look as quaint as a mechanical cuckoo clock. There is no complex math required; yet it allows you to easily use some fairly advanced techniques. Simple arithmetic, and a spreadsheet program, is all that is required of you. Lastly, it helps with the human side of performance. It shows you how to get the help you need and how to present your findings (good or bad) all the way up to the CIO level.

I'm a very tall small town Vermont kid who spent decades doing training and professional services work that mostly focused on making sure computers could keep up with constantly changing user demands and expectations. Many of those years were spent doing performance work on very high visibility customer systems where one mistake would have put that company in the news in a very unfortunate way. I have written and delivered many technical courses. All of them were clear, concise, and useful. I've been a featured speaker at numerous conventions. I'm married to my college sweetheart and enjoying a semi-retired life in Vermont where, one day a week, it is my great pleasure to give the tour at Ben & Jerry's with some of the finest people with whom I've ever worked. How sweet is that?