How this book is organized

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

Appendixes provide additional information about:

• the tools that you can use to examine performance

• the kernel parameters that you can use to tune performance

• a quick guide to system tuning