Why Your System Is Slow; Back to Basics

In the pursuit of optimizing computer systems, it is crucial to remember a fundamental truth:?performance is bound by two core factors—computation and storage.?No amount of tuning will yield meaningful results unless both are addressed in harmony.

Computer systems execute tasks through computation (CPU, GPU, or specialized accelerators) and handle data through I/O operations (reading, writing, and transferring data between storage and memory).?Amdahl’s Law highlights that the speedup of a system is fundamentally limited by the proportion of the task that cannot be parallelized, which often includes I/O bottlenecks.

Similarly,?Gustafson’s Law suggests that increasing computational power only benefits workloads that scale accordingly, but in practice, systems often stall waiting for data retrieval from memory or storage.

To optimize performance effectively, one should explore a?systems thinking approach, ensuring that both computation and storage are optimized simultaneously. In the world of performance engineering,?optimizing computation without addressing I/O is akin to tuning a race car’s engine while ignoring its fuel supply.?A system is only as fast as its slowest component, and real performance gains come from?understanding and mitigating bottlenecks at both ends.

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