Linux Performance: A comprehensive guide to using performance insights to improve capacity planning, scalability, and production stability

As systems grow in complexity and scale, performance engineering has become a specialized discipline rather than an afterthought. Linux remains the execution environment for most performance-critical workloads, making a deep understanding of its internals, metrics, and behavior essential for performance specialists.

This book delivers a systematic approach to Linux performance engineering, combining theory with practical analysis. It covers core performance metrics, kernel evolution, and formal methodologies for measurement and diagnosis. It explores advanced use of Linux performance tools, workload analysis techniques, queueing models, and bottleneck theory, along with real-world considerations for tuning and optimization across CPU, memory, storage, and networking subsystems.

After completing this book, performance specialists will be able to conduct rigorous performance investigations, explain system behavior with clarity, and apply targeted optimizations backed by data. They will be prepared to analyze complex Linux systems, defend performance decisions, and drive measurable improvements in system efficiency and scalability. You will also possess the practical skills to optimize any Linux environment, from physical servers to cloud-native containers.

What you will learn

● Measure Linux performance using practical command-line tools.

● Diagnose real production issues by identifying CPU, memory, I/O, and networking bottlenecks.

● Trace latency problems across scheduling and system layers.

● Collect, interpret, and correlate performance metrics under real workloads.

● Apply proven methodologies to isolate bottlenecks and validate fixes.

● Improve capacity planning, scalability, and production stability.

Who this book is for

This book is for SREs, DevOps, and systems engineers with basic Linux command-line knowledge. It serves performance engineers, researchers, and students ready to master kernel internals, hardware subsystems, and eBPF tracing tools to optimize production-scale, real-world Linux infrastructures.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction to Linux Performance Engineering

2. Linux Kernel Evolution and Performance

3. Performance Methodologies and Models

4. Essential Linux Performance Metrics and Measurement

5. CPU Performance Analysis and Optimization

6. Memory Performance and NUMA Awareness

7. Disk and I/O Performance

8. Network Stack Performance

9. Profiling Linux Kernel and Applications

10. Modern Linux Tracing and Observability

11. Advanced Memory, Filesystem, and I/O Stack Behavior

12. Linux Tooling Landscape

13. Benchmarking and Load Testing Essentials

14. Container and Virtualization Performance

15. Performance Tuning for Scalability

16. Filesystem and Storage Optimization

17. Case Studies on Troubleshooting in Production

18. Advanced Observability with eBPF