Cary Millsap has a great paper out – Thinking Clearly About Performance. It has reminded me how critical details can be in measuring performance, throughput, response time, efficiency, skew and load.
The beauty of this paper isn’t that it has some magical new technique, quite the opposite actually. The methods talked about are solid, fundamental approaches that can be used to methodically figure out what’s going in your system.
It’s only 13 pages long and is a pleasant, brisk read. I recommend it for anyone doing software development, database administration, or system administration.