HP-UX Tuning and Performance: Concept, Tools, and Methods
Robert F. Sauers, Peter S. Weygant · 1999
From the Book: PREFACE: Preface Maximizing the performance of Unix systems is a challenge that requires a specialized understanding of operating system behavior and an intimate acquaintance with system tools that assist in tuning. This book brings you some of this complex knowledge in chapters that provide general background, hardware and software performance concepts, reference material on performance tools, and detailed practical suggestions for application development and tuning. Part 1 offers a performance management methodology as a way of introducing the world of performance management. Part 2 presents an array of performance monitoring tools, some of them specific to HP-UX, and some of them available on other Unix operating systems as well. Part 3 describes bottleneck analysis, and relates operating system concepts to tuning strategies that use the tools presented in Part 2. Finally, Part 4 sketches the complex topic of application tuning. Tuning the operating system is often not enough; designing for performance is equally important. Hewlett-Packard's HP 9000 computer systems (both Series 700 workstation and Series 800 servers) use the HP-UX operating system. This is a version of Unix that is based on both System V Unix and BSD (Berkeley) Unix. The authors are most familiar with HP-UX, and therefore, the specific operating system architecture and tuning suggestions presented in this book apply directly to HP-UX. However, HP-UX conforms to the IEEE Portable Operating System Standard (Posix) P1003.1 and P1003.2. It also conforms to the System V Interface Definition (SVID) Release 3 (based on System V Release 4)andthe X/Open Portability Guide. Because of this conformance to both de jure and de facto standards by the HP-UX operating system, the concepts presented in this book may be applied to other versions of the Unix operating system, although the specifics may differ.