Low Latency and High Throughput
Benchmarking without deception, the fast path, mechanical sympathy, and lock-free messaging.
Benchmarking Without Deception
Warmup and the cold-call bias, coordinated omission and why it hides the tail, percentiles versus the mean, wall-clock vs CPU time, and the repeatable harness this book's other chapters cite for their own benchmark claims.
The Low-Latency Fast Path
Three concrete moves that shrink tail latency: core pinning, buffer reuse, and zero allocation, the busy-poll versus block decision, keeping syscalls and branches off the hot path, and where kernel bypass fits.
Mechanical Sympathy
False sharing and the cache line, alignas and hardware_destructive_interference_size, struct layout, per-thread counters versus a single hot atomic, and the cache-line discipline that keeps hot data from fighting over a line.
Lock-Free Messaging and the Disruptor
Ring buffers revisited as a messaging substrate, the Disruptor pattern, batching and back-pressure, and the single-writer principle that makes it all safe.