proomt

Search

Search posts, papers, and topics

Hall of Fame

Hall of FameBrendan Gregg201216 min readintermediate

The USE Method

Read on brendangregg.com

Summary

The USE Method is a simple checklist that, for every system resource, asks you to examine Utilization, Saturation, and Errors. Applying it early in investigations quickly surfaces bottlenecks that raw metrics alone can miss.

  • Check each resource (CPU, memory, NIC, disk, interconnects) for three metrics: utilization (busy time), saturation (queue length), and errors (count).
  • Utilization is a percent of time busy; saturation is work waiting to be serviced; errors are any failure events that may degrade performance.
  • Low average utilization can hide short spikes that cause saturation—monitor short‑interval metrics to catch them.
  • Build a functional block diagram of the system and annotate max bandwidths to spot potential bottlenecks before measuring.

Performance and operations engineers need a systematic, low‑effort way to pinpoint resource bottlenecks in complex servers and cloud services.

7/10
devopsobservabilitystoragearchitectureperformancenetworking

Related reading

  1. Lies, Damn Lies and Benchmarks

    Codename One engineers dissect why benchmark numbers can be misleading, then share concrete work on GC tuning, proper weak/soft references, and a new probing sequence for their open‑addressed HashMap that cuts miss‑probe counts from >16 k to ~1.5 per lookup.

    CodeName Onecodenameone.com20 min

  2. Article: Your Next DSL Author Is a Language Model

    Typed Domain Grounding (TDG) embeds a DSL inside a mainstream language the LLM already knows (e.g., Kotlin) and uses the host compiler as an oracle. The author describes five building blocks—embedding, choosing a host language with high training‑data frequency, compiler‑driven type safety, a generate‑compile‑repair loop, and an on‑demand teaching tool—and shows measured results from kUML, a Kotli…

    InfoQinfoq.com18 min

  3. The Twelve-Factor App

    The Twelve‑Factor App outlines a set of twelve best‑practice guidelines for building SaaS applications that are portable, scalable, and maintainable. Following the factors—codebase, dependencies, config, backing services, build/release/run, processes, port binding, concurrency, disposability, dev/prod parity, logs, admin processes—helps teams ship reliably to modern cloud platforms.

    Hall of Fame12factor.net1 min

  4. System Design Interviews for Data Roles: What to Actually Practice

    The piece shows that data‑role system design interviews evaluate how you turn vague requirements into a defensible architecture, not which tools you name, and it gives a concrete prep framework: clarify scope, quantify load, pick batch vs streaming with trade‑offs, and address failure handling. Candidates should rehearse explaining these decisions aloud with numbers rather than just drawing diagr…

    SitePointsitepoint.com6 min

  5. Article: Beyond Relevance: A Governance-First Architecture for Enterprise Personalization

    The article proposes a governance‑first architecture for enterprise personalization, where policy‑driven steps (memory, journey graph, AI routing, scoring, trust checks, outcome simulation) shape the recommendation before it is returned. A reference FastAPI implementation demonstrates the pattern with external YAML policies and optional LLM assistance.

    InfoQinfoq.com19 min

  6. Article: Architecting Secure and Scalable Facial Verification Systems

    A real‑world post‑mortem of a high‑volume face verification service that moved from a naïve synchronous API to an async, layered pipeline (edge validation, preprocessing, decoupled detection/verification, decision engine) to achieve 8.5k rpm, p99 < 1.8 s, 30 % cost savings, and strict privacy controls.

    InfoQinfoq.com15 min