How it works
Why does it behave this way?
- 1
Seven root causes: why trade-offs exist at all
Why does every storage system have trade-offs?
- 2
Storage media
What are disks, SSDs, tape and cloud storage made of, and what does that force on us?
3 pages - 3
CPU and memory
Why does it matter more how predictable your code is than how much work it does?
2 pages - 4
The network
Why is a network different from a disk, and why do networks collapse under load?
2 pages - 5
Performance laws
Which simple arithmetic controls every queue and thread pool, and why is 80% utilization already too much?
4 pages - 6
Why these limits last
How do we use these limits to judge new technology?