  We analyze a dataset of 51 current (2019-2020) Distributed Systems syllabi
from top Computer Science programs, focusing on finding the prevalence and
context in which topics related to performance are being taught in these
courses. We also study the scale of the infrastructure mentioned in DS courses,
from small client-server systems to cloud-scale, peer-to-peer, global-scale
systems. We make eight main findings, covering goals such as performance, and
scalability and its variant elasticity; activities such as performance
benchmarking and monitoring; eight selected performance-enhancing techniques
(replication, caching, sharding, load balancing, scheduling, streaming,
migrating, and offloading); and control issues such as trade-offs that include
performance and performance variability.
