Day two with an Blog I should really
introduce myself.
I manage the Performance QA team in Sun.
We're in sunny Dublin ( sunny for the
next 10 minutes anyway ) 4 other members of the team have blogs and I
finally
given in. Fintan Ryan has a couple of excellent blogs that
describe what we do here
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/fintanr/20050426
Basically we champion the
"Performance
Lifestyle". Sounds like marketing ?
It's not, it is something that grew from the ground up, first
setting performance
criteria for out of the box performance on each releases, not just
focusing on TPC-C
benchmark specials, then implementing a continuous improvement
model until it
becomes natural behavior for developers.
Our role is one of a catalyst. We make it so easy to test performance
properly, effectively and cheaply that engineers do. From Sun's view we
can afford
to because instead of 20 imperfect SPECweb2005 rigs that are 20% used
we have
10 90% used, better return on capital . Development teams save
time and energy
because the developers write code and do not waste time learning how to
configure
benchmarks, find and configure the hardware etc..
The good engineers ( the majority thankfully ) use us
* To tune their code
* Select the algorithm
* Check 2nd order effects on
platform they do not have access to.
* Run against a wide range
of workloads, one size does not fit all
"Performance is in the
eye of the customer"
That not so good ( mostly those that need training and a few well.....)
* Make sure they do not eat
into gains made by the good guys
* Ensure that poor code is
noticed and fixed early
* Show them its easy to do
it right next time :)
The best
* People hand over their resources
for us to manage and provide
a service to all Sun.
* People outside our organizations
provide us with Millions of
dollars from their budgets
in capital and head count ! putting
their money where their
mouth is. ( Darrin take a bow )
* Train us on the latest
technology thanks Sunay, Bryan, Brian.
Lastly we ensure that the results are visible to management, so those
that
do the right thing are noticed i.e. reward the right behavior.
This is not bums on seats engineering, we're a small focused 10 people
team
which provides massive ROI to Sun and its customer base, you've
heard
how much faster Solaris 10 and hopefully even seen it for yourself
we're
proud to be part of that.
More important if you have cases where Solaris 10 is slower please
drop me a line and we'll try to add your code to the expanding test
metric
of over 100+ benchmarks, many of which came from customers.
Interested in developing
OpenSoalris
? We'll be there to help you too :)
on http://opensolaris.org