BayLISA Meeting 10/18/2007 - Adrian Cockcroft

Wed Oct 17 10:34:19 PDT 2007

This promises to be a great talk, so all come down for the fun :)

BayLISA October General Meeting

Date: Thursday, Oct 18, 2007, 7:30pm start
Location : Yahoo, Bldg E, classroom 9.
Directions to Yahoo at http://yhoo.client.shareholder.com/press/address.cfm,
Turn left for blgd E instead of right for bldg D.

Utilization is Virtually Useless as a Metric!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Adrian Cockcroft - Director of Engineering, Netflix

We have all been conditioned over the years to use utilization or %busy as
the primary metric for capacity planning. Unfortunately, with increasing
use of CPU virtualization and sophisticated CPU optimization techniques
such as hyper-threading and power management the measurements we get from
the systems are "virtually useless". This paper will explain many of the
ways in which the data we depend upon is distorted, and proposes that we
turn to direct measurement of the fundamental alternatives, and express
capacity in terms of headroom, in units of throughput within a response
time limit.

About Adrian Cockcroft:
As a Sun Distinguished Engineer Adrian is best known as the author of four
books including Sun Performance and Tuning (2 editions); Resource
Management; and Capacity Planning for Internet Services. In his 16 years
at Sun he worked in technical sales and marketing, led creation of the
BluePrints best practice publishing program, tested very complex
integrated systems, was a leader of Sun's Six Sigma program and was the
Chief Architect and Product Boss for Sun's High Performance Technical
Computing business unit. In this time he gave many training classes and
consulted with a wide range of customers, most notably as the on-site
capacity planning consultant for the Salt Lake 2002 and Athens 2004
Olympic Games.

Joining eBay in 2004, he initially worked for Operations Architecture,
investigating new platforms and providing guidance to the capacity
planning groups at eBay and PayPal. As a founding member of eBay Research
Labs in 2005, Adrian helped define the initial strategy for the Labs and
an Innovation Forum.

In 2007 Adrian joined Netflix as a Director of Web Engineering, directing
a team responsible for research and development of scalable personalized
web architectures.

Adrian has a blog at http://perfcap.blogspot.com where he discusses
capacity planning techniques, new computer technology, and how markets and
innovation interact. He is also a member of the Homebrew Mobile Phone
Club, and several local classic car clubs.

Details also on http://www.baylisa.org