Knowledge trunk

Machines and performance

Latency, throughput, tails, memory hierarchy, profiling, and finding the owner of elapsed time.

updated 2026-08-25

Performance work is the practice of explaining where time, memory, bandwidth, or contention actually goes.

Start with Latency, throughput, and tails. Profiling the critical path is the discipline of finding the work that owns the result, while Memory hierarchy explains why equal-looking instructions can have very different physical costs.

This trunk is inseparable from measurement.

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