Comments about O'Reilly Media System Performance Tuning, 2nd Edition:

This is an excellent book, but, ten years later, it's now woefully out-of-date. It has a heavy emphasis on Solaris, whose use is in steep decline. Many of the technologies (SCSI, SBus) are obsolete. Other technologies (SSD, SATA, SAS) were not practicable at the time. There are still useful sections, but it's up to the reader to work out what parts are no longer applicable.

Comments about O'Reilly Media System Performance Tuning, 2nd Edition:

This book is again one of the "must have" from O'Reilly.

The title should have been something like "Understanding your system to tune it" because a contrary to many tuning books it does not only gives you some solutions but also (and this is where this book is really above average)makes you understand why your system behaves like it does.

As written on the back cover most of the discussion here concerns Solaris/Sparc although most of the principles can be applied to other unix flavours [One noticeable exception concerns the Solaris Kernel tunables, but perhaps the third editions will cover Solaris, Linux, HP-UX, FreeBSD, NetBSD ;-) ]

If you want an in depth coverage of memory/disk/cpu/network behaviour buy this book, you will not regret it.

Comments about O'Reilly Media System Performance Tuning, 2nd Edition:

Well, I've read many an O'reilly book but this one is truly amongst the best of the best.

If Solaris is your flavour of Unix and your hardware is SPARC then this book is for you (even if you're not after Performance Tuning as such but just want to learn more about the internals of the hardware and the OS).

If you only use Linux on Intel then this book may disappoint because it truly is written for real sysadmins using a real OS on real hardware ;-)

Comments about O'Reilly Media System Performance Tuning, 2nd Edition:

This book saved my bacon (cookies?) at a Solaris site.

As it says on the cover, it's biased towards Solaris(8) and Linux. It tells you how to configure the various critical resources (i.e. processors, memory, page and swap, disk, RAID etc.) and most importantly, it tells you why you're doing it. The authors also encourage you to use the book as a start point and and experiment with resource configuration to find out what works best for a given workload. There is also a lot of underlying information about processors, memory and interfaces (IDE and SCSI) that is very useful. The Linux info is good too but this edition doesn't cover Solaris 9. This isn't a problem because for performance/tuning purposes, there isn't much difference between Sol 8 and 9).

I haven't given it a definitive rating because with performance tuning, there is no such thing as definitive. But it's close.

A great book and highly recommended. Many thanks to the authors.