Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

[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

This book is good if you want to find bottlenecks in your system. If you are interested in finding a good book which helps you tweak your system for better performance (eg. web server performance tweaks vs. database server tweaks) keep looking. I think the title "Optimizing Linux Performance" is misleading.

Otherwise, if you are interested in learning how to analyze data from tools like vmstat, sar, or top, then it is worth the purchase.

Let me start off by saying that this book is not really bad. It doesnt really give any wrong information, it is organized in fairly nice fashion, and for beginners its probably a great place to start. The title is a little misleading though. It doesnt really give a bit of advice on how to optimize Linux performance. It is merely a beginners language version of the man page for tools.

I was expecting something that would explain how to resolve thrashing or cpu usage issues, not simply give me a rundown on the tools that can find those situations. I found the cause, now what? This book doesnt help answer that question at all.

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.

Good book. However it just skims through the tools you can use to check/analyze performance, but not enough details on completion of the analysis. Lots of places they just show how to start the analysis but does not go any further on how to determine the cause. We all know the tools to be used but they will only be good if it can yield the cause of performance. This book does not carry you that far.

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!