Software Performance and Scalability: A Quantitative Approach

A distinctive, educational text on software performance and scalability

This is the first book to take a quantitative approach to the subject of software performance and scalability. It brings together three unique perspectives to demonstrate how your products can be optimized and tuned for the best possible performance and scalability:

• The Basics—introduces the computer hardware and software architectures that predetermine the performance and scalability of a software product as well as the principles of measuring the performance and scalability of a software product
• Queuing Theory—helps you learn the performance laws and queuing models for interpreting the underlying physics behind software performance and scalability, supplemented with ready-to-apply techniques for improving the performance and scalability of a software system
• API Profiling—shows you how to design more efficient algorithms and achieve optimized performance and scalability, aided by adopting an API profiling framework (perfBasic) built on the concept of a performance map for drilling down performance root causes at the API level

Software Performance and Scalability gives you a specialized skill set that will enable you to design and build performance into your products with immediate, measurable improvements. Complemented with real-world case studies, it is an indispensable resource for software developers, quality and performance assurance engineers, architects, and managers. It is an ideal text for university courses related to computer and software performance evaluation and can also be used to supplement a course in computer organization or in queuing theory for upper-division and graduate computer science students.

About the Author

Henry H. Liu, PhD, is Software Developer at BMC Software. Previously, he worked as a physicist in the national labs of China, France, Germany, and the United States. He also worked at Intel and Amdocs as a software performance engineer prior to joining BMC. He was an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow from 1990–1992 in Germany. He was awarded the Best Paper Award at CMG's 2004 conference in the category of software performance engineering. He is a certified Sun Enterprise Architect, IBM XML Developer, and Microsoft .NET Developer. Dr. Liu is most interested in applying his previous scientific research disciplines to solving software performance and scalability challenges.