Linux performance investigation in 60 seconds

Since it is new year's eve I'm going to make it easy for myself.

Web service scale testing

When I say web service scale testing I mean testing to figure out how many instances of your service you need. This type of testing is really easy to explain but typically hard to get right.

To await or not to await - that is the question

One question that comes up quite often is if you should always use async/await or not. Sadly enough the answer is not simple because there is a trade-off between performance and ease of understanding exceptions.

Maturity model for service monitoring

Over the years I've encountered organizations and individuals that all have different levels of service monitoring maturity. I figured it was time to talk a little about these. And by monitoring I mean the things you look at to understand the health of a service. And I'm especially considering how good vs bad health is quickly determined.

Appreciating garbage

I once was working with a company that complained that my code was not optimized because it used 100% of the CPU. So I asked if the user interface was responsive. And it was. So I asked if they experienced any noticeable delays in responses. They didn't. So I asked for how long the CPU was at 100%. And the answer was...

Lying with statistics and StackOverflow

A recent article on StackOverflow performance brought some memories back; how easy it is to lie with statistics.

Hashtable vs ConcurrentDictionary

Historically I've seen the Hashtable be favored over ConcurrentDictionary with the assumption that is was more efficient allowing for lock free reads. Well they both allow lock free reads so which one is really the better option?