Comments about oreilly System Performance Tuning:

This is a great book to start learning about Unix System Performance tuning and should be required reading for anyone wanting to gain insight into the concepts of kernel tuning. However, having been last published in 1990, it neglects many aspects of a modern Unix OS. Tuning a Unix system for Web services is much different than tuning a system for an RDBMS or Application Server. RAID is only briefly mentioned and only as striping. Many performance issues arise when using RAID, especially when dealing with I/O blocksize for requests descending a vendor's filesystem, software RAID, hardware RAID and finally to physical disk. What about dealing with sychronous vs. asynchronous I/O? Small files vs. large files? A discussion of storage strategies is absent. This is all compounded in complexity by the proprietary filesystems the vendors have developed to achieve essentially the same goals. No discussion of filesystem journaling is contained in this book; however the discussion and explanation of filesystem buffers (nbuf) is good. A great deal of understanding Unix is understanding it's roots. "System Performance Tuning" is one step in that understanding.

Comments about oreilly System Performance Tuning:

This book is 10 years old. Here's a quote from page 136: "If you are going to invest in a really large disk drive (1-GB drives are now available from several vendors), you may as well spend the extra money and get one with good performance characteristics."

Can we have a revised edition, please? This is an excellent book but just a tad out-of-date.

Comments about oreilly System Performance Tuning:

I bought this book earlier this month without realising that it was published in 1990. Some of the basics are detailed extremely well and I found the book very useful. However, a 10 year old reference book on computer systems just wont do.

Comments about oreilly System Performance Tuning:

If you are reading this, you already respect the O'Reilly book collection. The first edition of the system performance tuning book is excellent. But, 10 years is an eternity in the computer world, I'm sure I can speak for many by saying we all look forward to an update to this invaluable reference.