# Diagnosing Unexpected Software Performance Problems on Linux Servers

DevFeed: [Diagnosing Unexpected Software Performance Problems on Linux Servers](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/this-is-not-the-performance-you-were-looking-for-the-tricks-systems-play-on-us-20215.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://blog.janestreet.com/this-is-not-the-performance-you-were-looking-for-the-tricks-systems-play-on-us/>)

Author: Andy Myers

Published: 2017-04-20T00:00:00Z

Content type: tutorial

Language: en

Sources: [Jane Street](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/jane-street.md>)

Topics: [Optimization](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/optimization.md>), [Linux](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/linux.md>), [systems](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/systems.md>), [Processes](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/processes.md>), [Software](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/software.md>), [Process](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/process.md>), [Server](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/server.md>), [Hardware](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/hardware.md>), [Latency](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/latency.md>), [Cache](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/cache.md>), [cpu](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/cpu.md>)

Tags: [hardware](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/hardware.md>), [kernel](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/kernel.md>), [latency](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/latency.md>), [linux](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/linux.md>), [linux-kernel](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/linux-kernel.md>), [numa](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/numa.md>), [optimization](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/optimization.md>), [performance](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/performance.md>), [processes](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/processes.md>), [processor](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/processor.md>), [server](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/server.md>), [systems](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/systems.md>)

## AI overview

A practical guide to diagnosing unexpectedly poor application performance on Linux servers. It covers verifying the deployed binary and libraries, process CPU affinity, processor cache locality, NUMA placement, hardware topology, and interference from other processes.

## Source excerpt

It's often surprising just how much software performance depends on how the software is deployed. All the time and effort you've invested in optimization can be erased by a few bad decisions in scheduler policy, affinity, or background workload on a server.