Ask HN: Feedback on Techniques List for Software Performance and Scalability
In my free time I'm writing a book on "Software Performance and Scalability" and would like your feedback and input.
One section in the outline is structured around a list of patterns and techniques which can improve or harm performance and scalability. The idea is to provide a single unified document which can remind the reader of all the techniques to consider, the trade-offs, how to apply them, give before-vs-after case studies, as well as talk about useful measuring and simulation tools, benchmarks and then recommendations of specific components, services, products, packages, languages, etc.
Any things to add to my list below? Change? Improve? Disagree?
Please discuss or give feedback in the comments below, or, you can also email me privately (my address is in my HN profile.)
1. Static Not Dynamic
2. Cached
3. Distributed
4. Parallelized
5. Asynchronous
6. Incremental
7. Queues with Worker Pools
8. Step Minimization
9. Complexity Optimal Algorithms
10. Event-Driven Not Polled
11. Non-Blocking IO
12. Paginated Results
13. Web Page Component Request Minimization
14. Network Locality
15. Machine Task-to-Data Locality
16. Precompute Predicted Requests
17. Eager Init vs Lazy Init
18. Beefier Hardware
19. Do Tasks in Hardware Rather than Software
20. Leaner Languages & Runtimes
21. Tuning OS Parameters
22. Custom OS Kernel Builds
23. Non-Virtual OS Instance
24. No OS
25. Minimize Context Switching
26. Avoid Swapping, Especially Thrashing
27. Minimize Chattiness of Comm Protocols
28. Pass Smaller Messages
29. Avoid Lock Contention
30. Pass and Store Diffs Rather Than Complete Snapshots
31. Client-Server Architecture
32. Function Inlining
33. Loop Unrolling
34. Less Memory Churn and Background GC Inside Your Process
35. Local Function Calls Rather Than RPC or Web Service Requests
thanks!
Mike Kramlich