Brendan Gregg

122 points

Los Gatos, California

Brendan Gregg is a senior performance architect at Netflix, where he does large scale computer performance design, analysis, and tuning.

Open Minded Author

Authored Content

Linux keys on the keyboard for a desktop computer

An introduction to bpftrace for Linux

New Linux tracer analyzes production performance problems and troubleshoots software.

How the science of happiness can improve OpenStack teams

7 tools for analyzing performance in Linux with bcc/BPF

Look deeply into your Linux code with these Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) Compiler Collection (bcc) tools.

Contributed Content

CPU utilization is wrong

Everyone uses %CPU to measure performance, but everyone is wrong, says Netflix's Brendan Gregg in his UpSCALE Lightning Talk.

Authored Comments

brendang

27 Aug 2022

Using eBPF for network observability in the cloud

It's great to see this analysis and your findings with data structures performance, however, I think you've missed the biggest point of all: Almost everyone is doing it wrong. You shouldn't be doing per-packet tracing nowadays. That's network observability from the 90's. I helped Netflix build a flow accounting solution based on kernel function tracing of TCP session changes, the core of which I open sourced as my tcplife bcc tool on github. The overhead of this approach is 0.1% even on very busy servers.

brendang

27 Aug 2022

Using eBPF for network observability in the cloud

(seems my prior post got cut off when I included a less-than sign)... less than 0.1%.