Solaris Performance and Tuning

Course:   SOLPT
Duration:   4 Days
Level:   II
On our website at:   http://www.verhoef-training.com/courses/SOLPT.html
 
Course Summary

This course is instructor led, with strong emphasis on hands-on practical sessions to reinforce the concepts introduced in the classroom.

The course provides students with an introduction to performance tuning principles and monitoring tools for the Solaris Operating System. This course presents the principles of performance tuning and usage of performance measurement tools, such as sar, vmstat, iostat, netstat, and nfsstat.

Central processing unit (CPU), memory and input/output (I/O) bottlenecks are described, with appropriate solution recommendations. Determining virtual file system performance is also covered, and a set of performance tuning heuristics is discussed.

Topics Covered In This Course

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
Who Should Take This Course

This course is aimed at Solaris system administrators who are wishing to obtain an understanding of the principles and practice of tuning a Solaris system to improve performance.

Recommended Prerequisites

All delegates should be thoroughly familiar with the UNIX environment and be proficient with the Sun Solaris system administration commands, be able to install and configure the Solaris operating system, manage pseudo and distributed file systems, manage storage volumes and describe network basics.

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Every student attending a Verhoef Training class will receive a certificate good for $100 toward their next public class taken within a year.

You can also buy "Verhoef Vouchers" to get a discounted rate for a single student in any of our public or web-based classes. Contact your account manager or our sales office for details.