13 — Performance Optimization

Site Reliability Engineering: From Foundations to Internet-Scale Systems

The complete 184-chapter, 15-part Site Reliability Engineering curriculum — from Linux internals and distributed-systems theory through reliability engineering, observability, incident response, platform engineering, and Staff/Principal-level MAANG interview preparation, ordered the way SRE expertise actually develops rather than as a topic index.

1 — Performance Fundamentals

Latency, throughput, and utilization as the three numbers that describe any system's performance — and why optimizing one in isolation usually degrades another.

10 — Soak Testing

Running sustained load over hours or days to surface the failure modes — memory leaks, connection exhaustion, log disk fill — that only appear over time.

11 — Capacity Testing

Finding the actual ceiling of a system's current configuration, which is the number capacity planning is supposed to be forecasting against.

12 — Performance Bottlenecks

Why a system's bottleneck moves once you fix the current one, and the systematic method for finding the next constraint instead of chasing symptoms.