These pages are the Swiss Army knife for everyone in the need to analyze and tune a Solaris system.

The intention is to provide freely available tools and commands which help to make a quick assessment of the system.

This performance primer follows the standard process on how you will want to analyze a performance. You'll have to understand the individual stack from the hardware through the operating system to the application first. This is the foundation which will allow you to narrow down your performance problem and fix it.

The nature of all performance problems is basically straight forward: An algorithm (application) with a given load is exhausting the resources underneath.

This primer allows everyone to determine the Solaris and hardware resources which become the bottleneck. You'll then have two options

• provide more Solaris or hardware resources by reconfiguration or
• change your application in a way which makes it more effective (example: caching) or teach to use more resources (example: multi threading).  

The Structure of the Primer