Thinking in Cycles

A Mental Model for Linux Performance

Thinking in Cycles

A Mental Model for Linux Performance

Thinking in Cycles is a practical, intuition-first guide to Linux performance engineering. It builds a cumulative model of how workloads become processes and threads, how Linux schedules them, how CPUs execute instructions, how caches and memory shape performance, how topology and NUMA affect placement, and how tools such as perf, flame graphs, BCC, and bpftrace reveal different parts of the system.

This is the rendered manuscript. See the project repository’s own README for the lab tooling, registries, and build instructions behind it.

This is a pre-publication manuscript.