Bart Smaalders

Performance Anti-Patterns

Performance pathologies can be found in almost any software, from user to kernel, applications, drivers, etc. At Sun we’ve spent the last several years applying state-of-the-art tools to a Unix kernel, system libraries, and user applications, and have found that many apparently disparate performance problems in fact have the same underlying causes. Since software patterns are considered abstractions of positive experience, we can talk about the various approaches that led to these performance problems as anti-patterns: something to be avoided rather than emulated.