Customer Reviews

Optimizing UNIX for Performance

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

 

 

Fantastic book on how to tune UNIX. It should be a required book in any UNIX administrators library. It covers all system aspects and UNIX flavors.

This book is not for the faint of heart, but if you're familiar with UNIX and are interested in learning more about its internals and how they affect performance, this is the perfect book for you! Majidimehr's explanations of UNIX internals are clear and concise, and he gives you all the details you need to understand how they all impact performance. My only gripe is that the book is getting a wee bit out of date (1996) so some of the specifics he discusses don't matter so much anymore. However, the general principles of performance tuning will never be obsolete, and I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in learning them.

I approach books that claim as much as this one does, with an air of suspicion. I was therefore looking out for ommissions or errors, seeing as I've studied the topic myself, and read a number of the documents Majidimehr refers to. I found very few errors, and those only of marginal importance. Within the bounds of commonality and effectiveness (of technique) that he set himself, the advice is complete, sound and easily absorbed. Majidimehr propounds a general approach around the practical advice, which will guide readers even when the book has no specific lesson to relate. The information Majidimehr presents is all available elswhere but he combines it and brings implications into clear focus for the reader, which makes it all worthwhile.

The author used this book in addition to his notes to teach his Unix Performance course at the UCalif at Santa Cruz Extention(which is next to San Jose Airport). Maybe the two day course was too short, but there were not enough coverage to be useful. While there are detailed account for raw performance comparisons between different hardware platforms, and hardware resource usage topics, there are no sections on performance tuning which is what you want out of this course. Yeah may be that topic is in the referenced books. Afterwards I went back to get the Cervone book(old but good) and discovered what I was missing. So know what you need before you buy. I didn't have a choice.