Essential Performance Engineering Resources & Reading

A curated list of books and articles we regularly recommend to engineering leaders and performance practitioners.

1. "Get Performance Requirements Right — Think Like a User" by Scott Barber

An essential read on how to formulate meaningful non-functional requirements—especially the critical distinction between users per hour and concurrent users.

Key takeaways:

• Identify the most business-critical transactions by thinking like a user and focusing on what impacts experience most.
• Design test data and pacing that simulate real-world usage rather than artificial zero-think-time loops.
• Treat performance testing as an iterative engineering discipline integrated early in the SDLC.

2. Brendan Gregg's Systems Performance Blog & Book

Brendan Gregg's site is a goldmine for low-level systems performance analysis, Linux observability, flame graphs, and eBPF tooling. His book Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud remains the definitive reference for diagnosing OS, CPU, memory, disk, and network bottlenecks.

3. The Art of Application Performance Testing by Ian Molyneaux

A concise, practical handbook covering end-to-end performance testing methodologies, meaningful metrics, capacity planning approaches, and common pitfalls in enterprise environments.