How this book is organized

Performance Guide
About this book

This book tells you:

what is meant by system performance
how to tune a system
how the configuration of various system components influences the performance of the operating system:
- Central Processing Units (CPUs) for single and multiprocessor systems
- memory including physical (main) memory in Random Access Memory (RAM) and swap areas on disk
- Input/Output (I/O) including hard disks and serial devices
- networking including STREAMS I/O, TCP/IP and NFS
how you can examine system call activity if you are an application programmer

A set of case studies illustrates the methodology of system tuning, and the tools that you can use to examine performance.

Appendixes provide additional information about:

There is also a glossary which explains technical terms and acronyms used throughout the book.