Introduction To Performance Management

• The fundamentals and reasoning of performance tuning, and the terminology of measuring performance

Tools For Monitoring The Solaris Operating System

• Identifying performance problems using both Solaris and third party monitoring tools and utilities
• The SymbEL (SE) Toolkit

Viewing & Setting Tuning Parameters

• An overview of parameter tuning
• Viewing and setting tuning parameters

Processes & Threads

• Processes and threads
• Comparing the performance of single-threaded and multithreaded processes
• Monitoring processes

CPU Scheduling

• What is scheduling?
• Displaying and changing scheduler parameters
• Changing the scheduling behaviour of a process
• Kernel thread dispatching
• Controlling and monitoring CPUs
• The Solaris Resource Manager projects and Fair Share Scheduler

System Caches

• What is a cache?
• What cache problems associated with multiple CPUs ?

Memory Tuning

• Monitoring memory utilization
• Virtual memory and caching disk-based files
• Managing paging and swapping
• The memory requirements of an application
• Identifying memory shortage in a system

Systems Buses

• Systems buses
• Describe the prtdiag utility to identify system hardware
• Diagnosing the problems associated with buses, and usage of the appropriate bus monitoring commands

I/O Tuning

• The characteristics of a SCSI bus
• The time components of disk I/O
• Drive caching and fast writes
• Monitoring device properties and configuration
• Describe virtualized storage, specifically VERITAS Volume Manager and Solaris Volume Manager)
• I/O performance planning, and tuning the I/O subsystem
• Monitoring disks by using the Vdbench and SWAT

Tuning UFS

• The file system interface, cache structures and links
• Volume-managed file systems
• Allocating data blocks
• Managing application I/O
• Monitoring the performance statistics of a file system
• File system characteristics that affect system performance
• Cluster sizes for redundant array of independent disks (RAID) volumes
• Controlling writes to a file system

Network Tuning

• Network performance and IP trunking
• The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)
• Monitoring networks by using Solaris utilities
• Monitoring networks by using the SE Toolkit programs

Tuning System Performance

• Tuning a system
• Identifying and eliminating performance bottlenecks
• Recipes for tuning a system