Why is it slow? Strategies for solving performance problems
- Room:
- Liffey A
- Start (Dublin time):
- Start (your time):
- Duration:
- 30 minutes
Abstract
You have a performance problem, and you don't know what to do. All you know is that one of your endpoints is very slow; and perhaps it only affects a certain user. How do you figure out why it's slow, and what can you do to catch performance problems before they hurt users in production? This talk will step through several scenarios involving typical performance problems and how to diagnose them.
TalkSoftware Engineering & Architecture
Description
You have a performance problem, and you don't know what to do. All you know is that one of your endpoints or applications is too slow; and perhaps it only affects a certain user or customer. How do you figure out why it's slow, and what can you do to catch performance problems before they hurt users in production?
We'll go through a wide range of strategies for detecting and diagnosing performance problems in typical production workloads. We'll cover both web-based domains as well as backend domains and other analytical applications involving number-crunching and big-data applications.
We'll step through the following high-level strategies:
- Tracing: through instrumentation of your code, you will get detailed traces of where the time is spent in generating your web server responses.
- Profiling: we'll look at profiling strategies using both the Python built-in cProfile tool, as well as awesome 3rd party libraries like pyspy, including how to use these with pytest
- Isolation: how to figure out if performance is affected by CPU, or memory, disk, or network IO limitations.
- Reasoning: we'll look at common scenarios that result in performance regressions such as the needless execution of sub-queries in rendering web views, or algorithmic analysis and "big-O" notation, or concurrency problems resulting from exhaustion of threads in a pool and asyncio concurrency limitations resulting from overloaded subscription.
- Prophylaxis: we'll look at how to include benchmarks within your CI pipeline, including with pytest and other technologies to catch performance regressions ahead of time.