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

Bryan Cantrill explores the challenges of performance debugging in complex systems where small, ill-behaving components cause non-linear performance degradation.

Presented by: Bryan Cantrill 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.