System Administration Guide, Volume 2

System Performance and System Resources

The performance of a computer system depends upon how the system uses and allocates its resources. It is important to monitor your system's performance on a regularly so that you know how it behaves under normal conditions. You should have a good idea of what to expect, and be able to recognize a problem when it occurs.

System resources that affect performance are described in the following table.

System Resource	Description
Central processing unit (CPU)	The CPU processes instructions, fetching instructions from memory and executing them.
Input/output (I/O) devices	I/O devices transfer information into and out of the computer. Such a device could be a terminal and keyboard, a disk drive, or a printer.
Memory	Physical (or main) memory is the amount of memory (RAM) on the system.

Chapter 36, Monitoring Performance (Tasks) describes the tools that display statistics about the activity and the performance of the computer system.

Sources of Performance Tuning Information

Performance is a broad subject that can't be adequately covered in these chapters. Sun provides performance tuning courses, online performance tuning information and several books are available that cover various aspects of improving performance and tuning your system or network.

For ...	Go To ...
Performance tuning classes	http://suned.sun.com
Online performance tuning information	http://www.sun.com/sun-on-net/performance
Ordering performance tuning documentation by Sun Microsystems Press such as Resource Management	http://www.sun.com/books/blueprints.series.html

System or network performance tuning is covered in the following books:

Resource Management by Richard McDougall, Adrian Cockcroft, Evert Hoogendoorn, Enrique Vargas, Tom Bialaski, Sun Microsystems Press, ISBN 0-13-025855-5
Sun Performance and Tuning: SPARC and Solaris, by Adrian Cockcroft, Sun Microsystems Press/PRT Prentice Hall, ISBN 0-13-149642-3
System Performance Tuning, by Mike Loukides, O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
Managing NFS and NIS, by Hal Stern, O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.