Sun Educational Services—Instructor-led Course Description
Solaris System Performance Management
SA-400
Solaris System Performance Management
provides an introduction to performance
and tuning principles and tools for the
Solaris™ 7 operating environment. The
course covers principles of performance
tuning and usage of performance
measurement tools such as sar, vmstat,
iostat, netstat and nfsstat. Memory,
input/output (I/O), central processing
unit (CPU), and network bottlenecks are
described and solutions are recommended
The course takes the approach that
computing systems are built of basic
components, such as buses and caches. If
these components can be recognized and
understood, they can be properly tuned
wherever they are encountered. It also
provides a better understanding of the
effect of changing tuning parameters,
based on the information derived from the
tuning tools. Knowledge of these
components can be applied to most
computing environments and
applications.
The course is designed to introduce
performance principles with specific
examples, allowing students to manage
and solve future performance problems
that have not specifically been discussed
during class.
Since knowledge of several of the major
operating system (OS) kernel subsystems
and hardware components are required to
understand the information provided by
the performance monitoring tools, the
course provides an overview, in context,
of the operating system’s major kernel
subsystems. These include the
multithreaded architecture, virtual
memory system, process lifetime cycles
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and scheduling, and the UNIX® file
system (UFS). System hardware
components, such as caches and buses,
are also discussed and analyzed.
Solaris System Performance Management
includes lab exercises, both in class, on
paper, and in laboratory on workstations,
analyzing Solaris-related performance
issues. Specifics for Solaris releases 2.6
and 7 are covered.
Who can benefit
The course is intended for individuals
who need to understand Solaris 2.x
performance issues to more effectively
manage machine resources. understand
the performance tools’ output, hardware
structure and operation, and system
configuration.
Prerequisites
To succeed fully in this course, students
should be able to
• Install and configure Solaris 2.x
• Administer Solaris 2.x servers
Skills Gained
Upon completion of this course, students
will be able to
• Explain what performance
tuning really means
• Explain relationships between
the various subsystems in the
Solaris system
30%
Lab Days
5
Lab Duration
 SA-400: Solaris System Performance Management

• Explain how caches enhance Course outline

system performance
• Describe the multithreaded
architecture used in Solaris and
multithreaded applications
• Describe the role the page
daemon and swapper play in the
virtual memory subsystem
• Explain how paging is done in
Solaris and what you can do to
tune it
• Modify the scheduling dispatch
parameter tables
• Understand the operation of
hardware I/O components
• Describe the placement policies
of the Solaris file system to place
inodes and blocks of data
• Explain how directory name
lookup cache and inode cache
improve performance
• Identify the bottlenecks between
the various subsystems where
you can tune
• Use sar, vmstat, and other tools
to measure system performance
and locate bottlenecks
• Identify memory bottlenecks
using sar, and vmstat
• Identify I/O bottlenecks using
iostat and netstat
• Identify CPU bottlenecks using
sar, vmstat, and ps
• Identify kernel bottlenecks using
sar
• Recommend ways to improve
performance of an application
• Distribute data and load on disks
for more efficient access
Module 1: Introduction to
Performance Management
• What is performance tuning?
• Basic tuning procedure
• Conceptual model of
performance
• Where to tune
• Performance measurement
terminology
• Performance measurement
graphs
• Sample tuning task
• The tuning cycle
Module 2: System Monitoring Tools
• How data is collected
• The kstat
• How the tools work
• Tools provided with Solaris
– sar
– vmstat
– iostat
– mpstat
– netstat
– nfsstat
• SyMON System Monitor
• Other utilities
– memtool
– /usr/proc/bin
– process manager
– SE Toolkit
– System accounting
• Viewing/Setting tuning
parameters

Related Courses
Before
• SA-287: Solaris 7 System
Administration II
After
• ST-350: Sun System Fault Analysis
Workshop
• ST-370: Core Dump Analysis

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 SA-400: Solaris System Performance Management
Module 3: Processes and Threads
• Process lifetime
• Process performance issues
• Process lifetime performance
data
• Process-related tunable
parameters
• Multithreading
• Application threads
• Process and thread execution
• Kernel and system threads
• Locking
• The lockstat utility
• Interrupt levels
• Clock processing
• Process monitoring using ps
• Process monitoring using system
accounting
• Process monitoring using SE
Toolkit
Module 4: CPU Scheduling
• Scheduling classes
• Dispatch priorities
• Dispatch parameter tables
• The dispadmin command
• The Interactive scheduling class
• Real-time scheduling
• The priocntl command
• Thread dispatching
• Processor sets
• The run queue
• CPU activity
• Performance data
• Solaris Resource Manager
• CPU control and monitoring
• The mpstat command
• CPU monitoring using SE Toolkit
Module 5: System Caches
• What is a cache
• Hardware caches
• SRAM and DRAM
• CPU caches
• Cache operation
• Cache misses
• Cache replacement
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• Cache data flows
• Cache hit rate
• CPU cache snooping
• Cache thrashing
• Cache hierarchies
• Relative access times
• Cache performance issues
Module 6: Memory Tuning
• Virtual memory
• The process address space
• Memory segments
• Virtual address translation
• Page descriptor cache
• Virtual address lookup
• The memory free queue
• The paging mechanism
• Page daemon processing
• Paging parameters
• File system caching
• The buffer cache
• The page cache
• Priority paging
• Paging statistics
• Swapping
• tmpfs
• Swapping statistics
• Shared libraries
• Memory utilization
• Physical memory
• File buffering memory
• Kernel memory
• Identifying applications memory
requirements
• Using memtool
Module 7: System Buses
• What is a bus?
• General bus characteristics
• System buses: MBus, XDBus,
UPA, Gigaplane, Gigaplane XB
• Peripheral buses: SBus, PCI
• PIO and DVMA
• The prtdiag command
• Bus limits
• Configuring to avoid bus
problems
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 SA-400: Solaris System Performance Management

Module 8: I/O Tuning • Sequential access workloads

• SCSI bus overview • File system read ahead
– Memory evaluation • Setting cluster sizes for RAID
– Memory tuning • File system write behind
– Filesystem tuning • UFS and physical I/O throttles
• SCSI bus performance • Random access workloads
characteristics • Tuning parameters
• SCSI speeds, widths, lengths • Tuning and performance
• SCSI bus addressing statistics
• Fibre channel
Module 10: Network Tuning
• Disk I/O time components and
• Networks and network
calculation
bandwidth
• Disk drive features
• Full duplex Ethernet
• Multiple zone recording
• IP trunking
• Drive caching and fast writes
• TCP connections
• Tagged queueing
• TCP stack issues
• Mode pages
• TCP tuning parameters
• Device properties
• The ndd command
• I/O performance planning
• Network hardware performance
• Tape drive operations
• NFS
• Storage array and JBOD
• NFS retransmissions
operation
• NFS server daemon threads
• RAID levels
• Monitoring network performance
• Tuning the I/O subsystem
– ping
• Tuning data
– spray
• Disk monitoring using SE Toolkit
– snoop
Module 9: UFS Tuning – netstat
• The vnode interface layer – nfsstat
• File system layout • Isolating problems
• UFS directories • Tuning reports
• Directory name lookup cache • Network monitoring using SE
• The inode cache Toolkit
• The inode
Module 11: Performance Tuning
• The metadata cache
Summary
• Hard and soft links
• General guidelines
• Allocating directories and space
• Application source code tuning
• Fragments
• Compiler optimization
• Logging file systems
• Application executable tuning
• Application I/O and the segmap tips
cache
• Performance bottlenecks
• Filesystem performance statistics
• Memory bottleneck summary
• fsflush
• I/O bottleneck summary
• Direct I/O
• CPU bottleneck summary
• mmap and madvise
• Ten tuning tips
• File system performance

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 SA-400: Solaris System Performance Management

• Case study
– System configuration
– Process evaluation
– Disk bottlenecks
– CPU utilization
– CPU evaluation

Appendix A: Interface Card

Properties
Appendix B: Installing and
Configuring SyMON System
Monitor
Appendix C: Accounting
Appendix D: The Cache File System
Appendix E: IPC Tuneables
Appendix F: Performance
Monitoring Tools

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Specifications are subject to change without notice.

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Services, and Solaris are trademarks, registered trademarks, or service marks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. UNIX is a registered trademark in the United States and other countries,
exclusively licensed through X/Open Company, Ltd. All other product or service names mentioned herein are trademarks of their respective owners.