The field of computing provided me with a day job for over 40 years. I shall not bore you by reciting the various areas that I worked in. Suffice it to say that in the last 25 years I worked principally in technical architectures, specialising in computer performance. I was particularly in demand for predicting performance before systems had been developed, probably because nobody else was daft enough to do it! I used to call it the Crystal Ball Gazing Act, because it was often 90% judgement and 10% science.
Eventually I wrote a book, Performance Assurance for IT Systems, which was published by CRC Press in August 2004. It was split into two main sections: lifecycle processes and technology tasters. Each taster provides an overview of a given technology and describes the factors which can affect its performance. There are sixteen tasters in the book.
This page provides access to supplementary material that I subsequently produced after the book was published. While some of it may be out of date much will still be germane, particularly the discussions on processes.
Treat it as a (hopefully) useful archive. Here it is (they are all pdf files) …
- Synopsis of the book
- More on Lifecycle Processes
- Yet More On Tasters
- eight additional technology tasters ..
- Server Consolidation: Virtualisation and Other Partitioning Techniques
- Thin Client Technology for Windows-based Systems
- Hyper-threading
- BandWidth Management (Edge)
- Cluster Interconnect Technologies
- Uses Of Cluster Interconnects: Distributed Shared Memory Systems, Computing Clusters, and Cluster Filesystems / Databases
- Portals
- Simultaneous Multi-Threading
- Performance Monitor Foibles
