Performance Engineering

Course Overview

The course will explore mostly recent systems papers with a focus on performance optimization and evaluation of systems. We will cover many topics from different areas of systems to build a better understanding of computer performance and help you learn how to evaluate your systems better. Three mini labs will help you learn a few practical tools to evaluate software performance at different levels. The group project will provide students with the opportunity to work on a small project and conduct further investigation and problem solving on their own.

Background

• Undergraduate level understanding of operating systems.
• Programming in C or other systems langauges

Course Project

• Individual or group projects of 2 or 3 people.
• Project paper will be due the last day of class.
• Each group should present and demo their project.
• Each group will need to submit a project proposal for approval

Performance Engineering Journey 

Most software solutions are backed by a database, meaning the overall application performance is greatly affected by the database's performance. It's therefore highly advantageous for software professionals to know how to analyze and optimize database performance. Take this comprehensive course to learn about the many facets of database performance optimization. Discover how to optimize data structures and examine the data definition language (DDL) used to manage that structure. Find out how to optimize data storage within a database as well as SQL queries that act on that data. Study performance tuning techniques. Practice optimizing a SQL table using indexes. And explore several optimization tools. Next, examine several strategies for optimizing database performance. Then see how to troubleshoot slow database symptoms in the context of an application. Upon completion, you'll know how to optimize database performance in isolation and as part of an application.