the material presented in this book will help readers develop new skills that can be applied in
their daily work.
Readers are expected to have a minimal background in C/C++ programming languages to
understand the book’s examples. The ability to read basic x86 assembly is desired but is not
a strict requirement. The author also expects familiarity with basic concepts of computer
architecture and operating systems like central processor, memory, process, thread, virtual
and physical memory, context switch, etc. If any of the mentioned terms are new to you, I
suggest studying this material first.
Acknowledgments
Huge thanks to Mark E. Dawson, Jr. for his help writing several sections of this book:
“Optimizing For DTLB” (section 8.1.3), “Optimizing for ITLB” (section 7.8), “Cache Warming”
(section 10.3), System Tuning (section 10.5), section 11.1 about performance scaling and
overhead of multithreaded applications, section 11.5 about using COZ profiler, section 11.6
about eBPF, “Detecting Coherence Issues” (section 11.7). Mark is a recognized expert in the
High-Frequency Trading industry. Mark was kind enough to share his expertise and feedback
at different stages of this book’s writing.
Next, I want to thank Sridhar Lakshmanamurthy, who authored the major part of section 3
about CPU microarchitecture. Sridhar has spent decades working at Intel, and he is a veteran
of the semiconductor industry.
Big thanks to Nadav Rotem, the original author of the vectorization framework in the LLVM
compiler, who helped me write the section 8.2.3 about vectorization.
Clément Grégoire authored a section 8.2.3.7 about ISPC compiler. Clément has an extensive
background in the game development industry. His comments and feedback helped address in
the book some of the challenges in the game development industry.
This book wouldn’t have come out of the draft without its reviewers: Dick Sites, Wojciech
Muła, Thomas Dullien, Matt Fleming, Daniel Lemire, Ahmad Yasin, Michele Adduci, Clément
Grégoire, Arun S. Kumar, Surya Narayanan, Alex Blewitt, Nadav Rotem, Alexander Yer-
molovich, Suchakrapani Datt Sharma, Renat Idrisov, Sean Heelan, Jumana Mundichipparakkal,
Todd Lipcon, Rajiv Chauhan, Shay Morag, and others.
Also, I would like to thank the whole performance community for countless blog articles and
papers. I was able to learn a lot from reading blogs by Travis Downs, Daniel Lemire, Andi
Kleen, Agner Fog, Bruce Dawson, Brendan Gregg, and many others. I stand on the shoulders
of giants, and the success of this book should not be attributed only to myself. This book is
my way to thank and give back to the whole community.
Last but not least, thanks to my family, who were patient enough to tolerate me missing
weekend trips and evening walks. Without their support, I wouldn’t have finished this book.
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