Amazon.com
Emphasizing Solaris 8 and, to a lesser extent, Linux, the new version of this book represents a significant revision (the first came out in 1990 and was pretty badly obsolete). There's coverage of advances in hardware--multiple processors, RAID storage, faster and cheaper memory, and networked devices--as well as consideration of changes in the demands placed on machines (after all, few people were concerned about Web server performance in 1990). Administrators will get plenty of value from the authors' discussion of what goes on during, for example, a series of large store-to-disk operations, and be better able to optimize their systems. --David Wall
Topics covered: How to get top performance from computer systems (those running Linux and especially Sun Solaris 8) without adding processor capacity, memory, and other resources at potentially great expense. The authors explain the ways in which operating systems and applications use processors, memory, persistent storage, and networks, and point out potential bottlenecks. They also show how to use tools--such as execution timers--that you can use to benchmark performance changes.
