Sun Performance and Tuning
by Adrian Cockcroft · first published 1994
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3HN commenters
2010–2024first – last mentioned
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…found (and spent 10s, if not hundred+ hours reading) are: System Performance Tuning, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly System Administration) by Gian-Paolo D. Musumeci [1] and the somewhat dated (and Solaris centric) Sun Performance and Tuning: Java and the Internet (2nd Edition) [2] I'd love to hear that there were better book out there - if anyone has read either of those two, and has found a better one, I'll be one-clicking it in 30 seconds.…
on “The Linux perf command rocks” ↗…not swap out (or in) cache memory to disk, so, as long as you are exhibiting no swapping behavior, (And you have swap enabled) then you have enough memory. I think it was Adrian Cockroft, in fact, in "Sun Performance and Tuning: Sparc & Solaris" who in fact said that was _the_ way to determine if you have memory pressure on your operating system - run vmstat and watch the si and so column for activity.
on “Exo Research CTO still does not understand how OS file caching works in Windows” ↗I spent years typing vmstat into Solaris machines after reading Cockroft's "Sun Performance and Tuning" book. You would think there would be something better these days, Solaris at least moved on to dtrace. Now I use atop on Linux which isn't as low level as dtrace but is much nicer than vmstat.
on “Linux Performance Measurements using vmstat” ↗…of the Sun performance "bibles" in the section on drive IO ... the book spoke of some "non commodity disks" that had multiple disk arms that moved independently on different platters. I think it was "Sun Performance and Tuning: Sparc & Solaris" (the Porsche book) but it might have been "Configuration and Capacity Planning for Solaris Servers."
on “MACH.2 Multi-Actuator Hard Drives” ↗