Performance Engineering From Kernel Analysis to AI: Adrian Cockcroft's Take
The New Stack, Sunday, September 27th, 2026
Adrian Cockcroft reflects on decades of performance work, from Solaris kernel metrics to how AI is reshaping the field.
In a ScyllaDB-sponsored post on The New Stack promoting P99 CONF 2026, RedMonk analyst Rachel Stephens interviews Adrian Cockcroft, known for performance and resilience work at Sun, Netflix, eBay and Amazon.
Cockcroft recalls reading Solaris kernel source to explain what vmstat metrics really meant, which led to two performance books, and discusses how AI has changed performance engineering by enabling tooling that otherwise would never have existed.
He also questions what today's end-to-end tracing tools still fail to show and is skeptical of over-reliance on P99 latency metrics.