Book Image

Hands-On High Performance with Go

By : Bob Strecansky
Book Image

Hands-On High Performance with Go

By: Bob Strecansky

Overview of this book

Go is an easy-to-write language that is popular among developers thanks to its features such as concurrency, portability, and ability to reduce complexity. This Golang book will teach you how to construct idiomatic Go code that is reusable and highly performant. Starting with an introduction to performance concepts, you’ll understand the ideology behind Go’s performance. You’ll then learn how to effectively implement Go data structures and algorithms along with exploring data manipulation and organization to write programs for scalable software. This book covers channels and goroutines for parallelism and concurrency to write high-performance code for distributed systems. As you advance, you’ll learn how to manage memory effectively. You’ll explore the compute unified device architecture (CUDA) application programming interface (API), use containers to build Go code, and work with the Go build cache for quicker compilation. You’ll also get to grips with profiling and tracing Go code for detecting bottlenecks in your system. Finally, you’ll evaluate clusters and job queues for performance optimization and monitor the application for performance regression. By the end of this Go programming book, you’ll be able to improve existing code and fulfill customer requirements by writing efficient programs.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Section 1: Learning about Performance in Go
7
Section 2: Applying Performance Concepts in Go
13
Section 3: Deploying, Monitoring, and Iterating on Go Programs with Performance in Mind

Understanding Modern Computer Memory - A Primer

Modern computers have Random Access Memory (RAM), which is utilized in machine code and data storage. RAM is used alongside the CPU and hard disks in order to store and retrieve information. Utilizing the CPU, RAM, and disks has performance trade-offs. In a modern computer at the time of writing, we have the following generic, rounded timings for some common operations in computers:

Data Storage Type

Timing

L1 (Processor Cache) Reference

1 ns

L2 (Processor Cache) Reference

4 ns

Main Memory Reference

100 ns

SSD Random Read

16 μs

7200 RPM HDD Disk Seek

2 ms

As you'll notice from the table, the different storage types have wildly differing timings for different portions of a modern computer's architecture. New computers have KBs of L1 cache, MBs of L2 cache, GBs of main memory...