Hands-On High Performance with Go

Boost and optimize the performance of your Golang applications at scale with resilience

Bob Strecansky

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781789805789
• eBook ISBN: 9781789801774
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Parallel Programming
• Index: Computer Science

Proven methodologies and concurrency techniques that will help you write faster and better code with Go programming

Key Features

• Explore Go's profiling tools to write faster programs by identifying and fixing bottlenecks
• Address Go-specific performance issues such as memory allocation and garbage collection
• Delve into the subtleties of concurrency and discover how to successfully implement it in everyday applications

Book Description

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.

What you will learn

• Organize and manipulate data effectively with clusters and job queues
• Explore commonly applied Go data structures and algorithms
• Write anonymous functions in Go to build reusable apps
• Profile and trace Go apps to reduce bottlenecks and improve efficiency
• Deploy, monitor, and iterate Go programs with a focus on performance
• Dive into memory management and CPU and GPU parallelism in Go

Who this book is for

This Golang book is a must for developers and professionals who have an intermediate-to-advanced understanding of Go programming, and are interested in improving their speed of code execution.

Section 1: Learning about Performance in Go

In this section, you will learn why performance in computer science is important. You will also learn why performance is important in the Go language. Moving on, you will learn about data structures and algorithms, concurrency, STL algorithm equivalents, and the matrix and vector computations in Go.

The chapters in this section include the following:

• ​Chapter 1, Introduction to Performance in Go
• Chapter 2, Data Structures and Algorithms
• Chapter 3, Understanding Concurrency
• Chapter 4, STL Algorithm Equivalents in Go
• Chapter 5, Matrix and Vector Computation in Go

Introduction to Performance in Go

This book is written with intermediate to advanced Go developers in mind. These developers will be looking to squeeze more performance out of their Go application. To do this, this book will help to drive the four golden signals as defined in the Site Reliability Engineering Workbook (https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/monitoring-distributed-systems/). If we can reduce latency and errors, as well as increase traffic whilst reducing saturation, our programs will continue to be more performant. Following the ideology of the four golden signals is beneficial for anyone developing a Go application with performance in mind.

In this chapter, you'll be introduced to some of the core concepts of performance in computer science. You'll learn some of the history of the Go computer programming language, how its creators decided that it was important to put performance at the forefront of the language, and why writing performant Go is important. Go is a programming language designed with performance in mind, and this book will take you through some of the highlights on how to use some of Go's design and tooling to your advantage. This will help you to write more efficient code.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Understanding performance in computer science
• A brief history of Go
• The ideology behind Go performance

These topics are provided to guide you in beginning to understand the direction you need to take to write highly performant code in the Go language.

Technical requirements

For this book, you should have a moderate understanding of the Go language. Some key concepts to understand before exploring these topics include the following:

• The Go reference specification: https://golang.org/ref/spec
• How to write Go code: https://golang.org/doc/code.html
• Effective Go: https://golang.org/doc/effective_go.html

Throughout this book, there will be many code samples and benchmark results. These are all accessible via the GitHub repository at https://github.com/bobstrecansky/HighPerformanceWithGo/.

If you have a question or would like to request a change to the repository, feel free to create an issue within the repository at https://github.com/bobstrecansky/HighPerformanceWithGo/issues/new.

Understanding performance in computer science

Performance in computer science is a measure of work that can be accomplished by a computer system. Performant code is vital to many different groups of developers. Whether you're part of a large-scale software company that needs to quickly deliver masses of data to customers, an embedded computing device programmer who has limited computing resources available, or a hobbyist looking to squeeze more requests out of the Raspberry Pi that you are using for your pet project, performance should be at the forefront of your development mindset. Performance matters, especially when your scale continues to grow.

It is important to remember that we are sometimes limited by physical bounds. CPU, memory, disk I/O, and network connectivity all have performance ceilings based on the hardware that you either purchase or rent from a cloud provider. There are other systems that may run concurrently alongside our Go programs that can also consume resources, such as OS packages, logging utilities, monitoring tools, and other binaries—it is prudent to remember that our programs are very frequently not the only tenants on the physical machines they run on.

Optimized code generally helps in many ways, including the following:

• Decreased response time: The total amount of time it takes to respond to a request.
• Decreased latency: The time delay between a cause and effect within a system.
• Increased throughput: The rate at which data can be processed.
• Higher scalability: More work can be processed within a contained system.

There are many ways to service more requests within a computer system. Adding more individual computers (often referred to as horizontal scaling) or upgrading to more powerful computers (often referred to as vertical scaling) are common practices used to handle demand within a computer system. One of the fastest ways to service more requests without needing additional hardware is to increase code performance. Performance engineering acts as a way to help with both horizontal and vertical scaling. The more performant your code is, the more requests you can handle on a single machine. This pattern can potentially result in fewer or less expensive physical hosts to run your workload. This is a large value proposition for many businesses and hobbyists alike, as it helps to drive down the cost of operation and improves the end user experience.

A brief note on Big O notation

Big O notation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_O_notation) is commonly used to describe the limiting behavior of a function based on the size of the inputs. In computer science, Big O notation is used to explain how efficient algorithms are in comparison to one another—we'll discuss this more in detail in Chapter 2, Data Structures and Algorithms. Big O notation is important in optimizing performance because it is used as a comparison operator in explaining how well algorithms will scale. Understanding Big O notation will help you to write more performant code, as it will help to drive performance decisions in your code as the code is being composed. Knowing at what point different algorithms have relative strengths and weaknesses helps you to determine the correct choice for the implementation at hand. We can't improve what we can't measure—Big O notation helps us to give a concrete measurement to the problem statement at hand.

Methods to gauge long term performance

As we make our performance improvements, we will need to continually monitor our changes to view impact. Many methods can be used to monitor the long-term performance of computer systems. A couple of examples of these methods would be the following:

• Brendan Gregg's USE Method: Utilization, saturation, and errors (www.brendangregg.com/usemethod.html)
• Tom Wilkie's RED Metrics: Requests, errors, and duration (https://www.weave.works/blog/the-red-method-key-metrics-for-microservices-architecture/)
• Google SRE's four Golden Signals: Latency, traffic, errors, and saturation (https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/monitoring-distributed-systems/)

We will discuss these concepts further in Chapter 15, Comparing Code Quality Across Versions. These paradigms help us to make smart decisions about the performance optimizations in our code as well as avoid premature optimization. Premature optimization plays as a very crucial aspect for many a computer programmers. Very frequently, we have to determine what fast enough is. We can waste our time trying to optimize a small segment of code when many other code paths have an opportunity to improve from a performance perspective. Go's simplicity allows for additional optimization without cognitive load overhead or an increase in code complexity. The algorithms that we will discuss in Chapter 2, Data Structures and Algorithms, will help us to avoid premature optimization.

Optimization strategies overview

In this book, we will also attempt to understand what exactly we are optimizing for. The techniques for optimizing for CPU or memory utilization may look very different than optimizing for I/O or network latency. Being cognizant of your problem space as well as your limitations within your hardware and upstream APIs will help you to determine how to optimize for the problem statement at hand. Optimization also often shows diminishing returns. Frequently the return on development investment for a particular code hotspot isn't worthwhile based on extraneous factors, or adding optimizations will decrease readability and increase risk for the whole system. If you can determine whether an optimization is worth doing early on, you'll be able to have a more narrowly scoped focus and will likely continue to develop a more performant system.

It can be helpful to understand baseline operations within a computer system. Peter Norvig, the Director of Research at Google, designed a table (the image that follows) to help developers understand th...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright and Credits
• Dedication
• About Packt
• Contributors
• Preface
• Section 1: Learning about Performance in Go
• Introduction to Performance in Go
• Data Structures and Algorithms
• Understanding Concurrency
• STL Algorithm Equivalents in Go
• Matrix and Vector Computation in Go
• Section 2: Applying Performance Concepts in Go
• Composing Readable Go Code
• Template Programming in Go
• Memory Management in Go
• GPU Parallelization in Go
• Compile Time Evaluations in Go
• Section 3: Deploying, Monitoring, and Iterating on Go Programs with Performance in Mind
• Building and Deploying Go Code
• Profiling Go Code
• Tracing Go Code
• Clusters and Job Queues
• Comparing Code Quality Across Versions
• Other Books You May Enjoy