Optimizing Linux Performance: A Hands-On Guide to Linux Performance Tools

[Review: long] First about the title: The title should have been just "A Hands-On Guide to Linux(R) Performance Tools". That would have been less missleading and most readers could have appreciated the debugging scenarios at the end of the book more. O.K now about the book itself: I am currently a system administrator in a medium sized company (ca. 200 employees) I am using different flavours of Linux since 5+ years (Debian, Mandrake, Suse, Redhat etc). Every now and then I found several man pages sometimes hard to comprehend. Most man pages do describe available options on their own but - unfortunately - they fail to deliver the big picture, including f.e. practical samples of how to use those options in real life scenarios and how to evaluate (read) the output given to the screen (or a file). This is exactly where Ezolt comes in with the "Hands-on Guide" and ease the pain in a fantastic way. Whats makes this book so indispensible is that it describes the below list of tools in a way that demystifies many of the command line options and the screen clutter. The book immediately became my best friend. The book is with 350p quite compact (keep in mind the many tools described below) and that allows you to take it with you onsite, while not being to heavy. To really maximise the usage of the book I suggest to use little post-it like notes, so that you can refer to them, when you are onsite and forgot the one or the other trick. My post-it notes loose regularly the writing from the many tear (usage). ;-) Note that many of the tools below are described 2 times or more within the book, depending on their usage f.e. as CPU or Memory based investigation tool. The book is somehow different from what I expected, but keep in mind that one book can seldom tackle all issues and I believe Ezolt has striked a very good balance here. Ezolt is describing many scenarios that probably most system admin came accross, but didnt know yet how to handle them. Ezolt now gave them the tools to finally put them to good use in a wide area. I give Ezolt both thumbs up alone for the fact that it is the first book out there that tackled that man page issue quite nicely and "translated" those man pages including the refering command line interfaces in a for me readable format. Well done !! List of (mostly command line) tools described in the book (39): For CPU + based troubleshooting (13): vmstat top procinfo gsm mpstat sar oprofile time strace ltrace ps ld.so gprof For Memory based troubleshooting (8): free slabtop memprof valgrind kcachegrind ipcs iostat lsof For Network based troubleshooting (8): miitool ethtool ifconfig ip gkrellm iptraf netstat etherape Utility tools (10): bash tee script watch gnumeric ldd objdump (f)grep gdb gcc

I liked the attention to detail throughout this book, but felt it could have gone much farther. The case studies were excellent, but at the same time disappointing because they concentrated on code bugs/problems rather than optimization of the system itself. In spite of that, this is still valuable, I particularly liked that the output of tools was mostly fully explained: too many books ignore that detail and leave you wondering what certain column headings mean. I didn't like that the shell examples were run on different machines with the prompt set to the machine name - this was confusing as often I momentarily thought the prompt was a command being run.

This is a great book for isolating and resolving performance problems on a single host. I wish the author would have spent less time on graphical tools, and more on multi-system/inter-system performance tuning.

Easy to read with logical explanations. A great window to Linux.

This is an excellent book for those who those who are considering moving from Windows, or are Linux fans already!