Customer Reviews

Sun Performance and Tuning: Java and the Internet (2nd Edition)

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

 

 

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.

There is no question that if you are involved in performance related issues on the SUN Sparc platform, you have to buy this book. It gives you invaluable information and helps you determine what is actually happening on a given system. Having said that, I wish it was better written and organized. This book is intended, I feel, for the intermediate to advanced systems administrator.

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!

This is a book for all Solaris professionals and non-professionals who have to deal with performance issues on the Solaris platform. Gives much needed nuts and bolts approach to performance analysis and give behind the scenes details. Some sections are too technical for novices and even Solaris Administrators familiar with many programming concepts and architectural issues may struggle with some technical discussions.

Negatives: Some sections are a little preachy toward the Solaris operating sytem. This shouldn't be a surprise since it's written by Sun Employees about Solaris. Sometimes technical illustrations of tuning result in this version of Solaris do XYZ, but we fixed it with patches or it was resolved in an operating system upgrades. This leaves you saying in some cases that's real nice, but all I have to do is upgrade or patch Solaris instead of tune it.

Positives: Most administrators and UNIX system professionsals are starved for this type of information. There are few technical courses of this type available and don't always go into this level of detail. Generally, it's very well presented on a subject that can be difficult to present in a capativating way.

This is a great book for an understanding of Solaris Systems, it covers a wide variety of topics and features. There isn't alot of tunining info in it though, and it seems more geared to understanding your system rather than changing. One thing I disliked was the lack of coverage of Solaris for Intel Versions.

I read this book. I feel that it is a must read guide for all Senior System Administrator. It is one of a very few books available covering so deep about Performance Tuning.

One of the best book on SUN.

Great book but needs to be updated.

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.

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.

This 2nd edition of Cockroft's classic on Sun Performance Tuning was a step up from the somewhat meager meal served in its 1st edition.

At the time of its writing this book filled a void, since there was not much "out there" covering performance tuning in general as well as for Sun boxes in particular.

Mike Loukides' "System Performance Tuning" still hung around in its 1st edition, and thus had established itself somewhat as the grand-daddy of UNIX performance tuning books, but was already pretty outdated. It's 2nd edition was still years away.

While Adrian Cockroft's "Sun Performance and Tuning" today still provides some interesting insights, and therefore could be a welcome addition to a Sun system administrator's bookshelf, there's another book which should be considered first: "Resource Management" from the Sun BluePrints series, which he wrote in collaboration with Richard Mc Dougall, and various others.