Solaris Performance Tools

© July 2006 Anthony Lawrence

This is a companion to Solaris(TM) Internals : Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris Kernel Architecture (2nd Edition).

I'm not as fascinated by tuning as I used to be, probably because defaults are so good and hardware is so fast today that the subject seldom comes up on small systems, and when it does there's usually something radically wrong.

Nevertheless, this was an interesting read. I did not know, for example, that Sun added "microstate accounting" to handle the problem of too regular sampling (that might happen to coincide with system idle times).

Most of this book is about Dtrace (Sun's Dynamic Tracing Tool) and MDB (Modular Debugger), but it doesn't entirely neglect the more mundane iostat, vmstat, sar and so on.

Definitely valuable if you work in a Solaris environment.

As of Leopard, Dtrace is on Mac OS X also.

• Richard McDougall, Brendan Gregg Jim Mauro
• Sun Microsystems
• 0131568191

Order (or just read more about) Solaris(TM) Internals : Solaris Performance and Tools  from Amazon.com

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