The Solaris System Performance Management course introduces students to performance tuning principles, monitoring utilities and tuning tools for the Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS). The presentation includes a review of Solaris subsystems and the utilities provided to monitor system efficiency including sar, vmstat, iostat, netstat, mpstat, nfsstat. This revision also presents tools new to Solaris 10, including DTrace, alongside these well known utilities. The course format isolates each major system component that affects system performance data. Case studies are used to illustrate how performance bottlenecks can be isolated, confirmed through analysis, and resolved through making adjustments to the system configuration. The Central Processing Units (CPUs), memory, and input/output (I/O) systems are reviewed to clarify standard techniques for monitoring each one. Monitoring and tuning virtual memory operations, ZFS and UFS file systems, and network efficiency are discussed as well. The course concludes with a more general examination of the full cycle of identifying and resolving performance impediments. The Solaris System Performance Management course includes lab exercises to reinforce skills development.

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Senior system administrators and others concerned with monitoring effective performance of Solaris systems can benefit from this course. Students who want to learn the performance tools provided with Solaris 10 can also benefit from this course.

To succeed fully in this course, students should be able to:

• Install and configure the Solaris OS
• Employ advanced systems administration skills in a networked Solaris OS
• server environment
• Manage pseudo and distributed file systems
• Create and manage logical volumes
• Describe fundamentals of TCP operations

Upon completion of this course, students should be able to:

• Describe performance management fundamentals
• Use the Solaris OS tools to analyze performance
• View and set kernel-based tuning parameters
• Monitor and report on process and thread activity
• Modify CPU scheduling and virtual memory operations
• Describe system caches and system buses
• Tune I/O, ZFS and UFS File System, and network subsystems

Module 1 - Introducing Performance Management

• Describe the principles of performance tuning
• Describe the performance tuning process
• Understand the terms used to describe performance aspects
• Describe the Drill-Down Analysis Strategy
• Describe the Performance Analysis Approach
• Understand the Solaris Observability Tools
• List the kstat based utilities
• List the procfs based utilities
• List DTrace based utilities

• List the Advantages of DTrace
• Describe the DTrace Architecture
• List the Four Parts of a Probe Description
• Define a Probe Clause
• Write and Execute DTrace ?one-liner? Commands
• Write some Simple Dtrace Scripts
• Download and Use Scripts from the DTrace Toolkit

• Describe and use monitoring tools provided with the Solaris OS
• Describe and use kstat-based utilities
• Understand system-wide monitoring

• Describe and use process monitoring tools provided with the Solaris OS
• Describe and use prstat and DTrace utilities
• Understand process monitoring

• Describe the lifetime of a process
• Describe states of a process
• Describe threads
• Compare the performance of single-threaded and multithreaded processes
• Monitor processes
• Describe and use lockstat(1M)

• Describe scheduling
• Display and change scheduler parameters
• Change the scheduling behavior of a process
• Describe and use Solaris Resource Manager projects and the Fair Share Scheduler (FSS)

• Monitor memory utilization
• Describe virtual memory
• Cache disk-based files
• Identify cyclic page cache
• Describe swapping

• Describe L1/L2
• Describe the cpustat utility

• Understand file system performance statistics
• Describe OS services that affect ZFS performance
• Describe application behavior that affects ZFS performance
• Describe OS services that affect UFS performance
• Describe application behavior that affects UFS performance

• Describe TCP and UDP
• Describe ICMP
• Describe the performance of network hardware

• Describe steps for maintaining system performance
• Set up system accounting
• Describe common utilities for measuring system performance and identifying problem applications
• Describe specific types of bottlenecks and methods for reducing them
• Describe a basic method for tuning system performance

• Plan to conduct performance testing
• Understand common pitfalls