Sun Performance and Tuning: Java and the Internet

Great book but needs to be updated.

The first 5 pages alone helped me to tune my systems, setup cachefs, etc. Definitely worth the money if you are responsible for the care and feeding of Solaris boxes.

As a sys admin I was thrown into a situation where Sun and Solaris were getting a bad rap due to (perceived) bad performance. This book gave me the knowledge I needed to fix what I could AND put the onus back on the application where it belonged. The detailed descriptions of SPARC & ULTRA architecture (complete with diagrams) is invaluable and I refer to them all the time. Buy it for the first 4 pages alone!

I've read, re-read, and marked multiple pages of the book, and used it as a guide to monitor multiple systems. This is the best Solaris performance monitoring documention I've seen to dated. The specific utilities covered (vmstat, sar, iostat), give very useful clues about what to look for on systems. Coverage of some system utilties including sar, mpstat, and netstat were limited, and left me looking for missing chapters. Network I/O statistics and items to monitor were poorly covered, in favor of html java, and internet specific applications.

This book rocks. It gives you a very detailed view of different pieces of the system, and even goes on to debunk some of the more outrageous comptetitors claims. Lots of tunig tricks and explanations of why they will or won't work. I'm an experienced Solaris admin (~3 years) and I still got a lot of new info.