mainframes

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 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and thus had established itself somewhat as the grand-daddy of UNIX performance tuning books, but was already pretty outdated.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.

After reading the other reviews I had high hopes for this book. The book is not geared to people that already have basic sysadmin skills. And in one case the book makes a rather dubious statement. They list a few ndd parameters and state "The other values should never be changed on a production system." Well, they left out tcp_ip_abort_cinterval. And they don't mention tcp_ip_abort_linterval at all which so far seems to be an undocumented Sun Microsystems parameter. A book about tuning should cover all the tunable parameters and explain cause/effect. Simply stating that you never change the other parameters without explaining why isn't why you buy a book on Performance and Tuning.

If you're just starting out with Sun administration and do not know a lot of the unix commands to administer and monitor a Solaris box this book will help. The book does cover much of the basics and background that someone starting out needs. The book does leave out a number of higher level concepts and doesn't cover all tunable parameters so it doesn't really help much beyond already available text/webpages which you'll still have to research and scour to really learn the whole story on Solaris performance and tuning. But if you already know some of what you're doing you're money is better kept in your pocket.