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| Book: | System Performance Tuning | |
| Subject: | System Performance Tuning Review | |
| Date: | 2002-01-14 08:56:08 | |
| From: | Mario | |
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Rating:
 
This is a great book to start learning about Unix System Performance tuning and should be required reading for anyone wanting to gain insight into the concepts of kernel tuning. However, having been last published in 1990, it neglects many aspects of a modern Unix OS. Tuning a Unix system for Web services is much different than tuning a system for an RDBMS or Application Server. RAID is only briefly mentioned and only as striping. Many performance issues arise when using RAID, especially when dealing with I/O blocksize for requests descending a vendor's filesystem, software RAID, hardware RAID and finally to physical disk. What about dealing with sychronous vs. asynchronous I/O? Small files vs. large files? A discussion of storage strategies is absent. This is all compounded in complexity by the proprietary filesystems the vendors have developed to achieve essentially the same goals. No discussion of filesystem journaling is contained in this book; however the discussion and explanation of filesystem buffers (nbuf) is good. A great deal of understanding Unix is understanding it's roots. "System Performance Tuning" is one step in that understanding.
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