Backend Performance — resources
roadmap.sh: https://roadmap.sh/best-practices/backend-performance
Books
- Designing Data-Intensive Applications (Martin Kleppmann) — the reference for reasoning about throughput, latency, and storage trade-offs at scale.
- Systems Performance (Brendan Gregg) — definitive guide to the USE method, profiling, and methodical performance analysis.
- Database Internals (Alex Petrov) — how storage engines, indexes, and distributed databases actually work under the hood.
- High Performance Browser Networking (Ilya Grigorik) — free online; deep dive into HTTP/2, TLS, and network latency that backends serve over.
Courses / practice
- k6 documentation — practical, scriptable load testing to measure latency and throughput.
- Brendan Gregg’s website — flame graphs, the USE method, and performance tooling from the source.
- Use The Index, Luke — a focused, free course on SQL indexing and query performance.
- PostgreSQL documentation: Performance Tips — official guidance on EXPLAIN, indexing, and query tuning.