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Solaris(TM) Performance and Tools: DTrace and MDB Techniques for Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris (Solaris Series)x$10.01
  (13 reviews)
Best Price: $54.99 $10.01
"The Solaris Internals volumes are simply the best and most comprehensive treatment of the Solaris (and OpenSolaris) Operating Environment. Any person using Solaris--in any capacity--would be remiss not to include these two new volumes in their personal library. With advanced observability tools in Solaris (like DTrace), you will more often find yourself in what was previously unchartable territory. Solaris Internals, Second Edition, provides us a fantastic means to be able to quickly understand these systems and further explore the Solaris architecture--especially when coupled with OpenSolaris source availability." --Jarod Jenson, chief systems architect, Aeysis "The Solaris Internals volumes by Jim Mauro and Richard McDougall must be on your bookshelf if you are interested in in-depth knowledge of Solaris operating system internals and architecture. As a senior Unix engineer for many years, I found the first edition of Solaris Internals the only fully comprehensive source for kernel developers, systems programmers, and systems administrators.The new second edition, with the companion performance and debugging book, is an indispensable reference set, containing many useful and practical explanations of Solaris and its underlying subsystems, including tools and methods for observing and analyzing any system running Solaris 10 or OpenSolaris. " --Marc Strahl, senior UNIX engineer Solaris Performance and Tools provides comprehensive coverage of the powerful utilities bundled with Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris, including the Solaris Dynamic Tracing facility, DTrace, and the Modular Debugger, MDB. It provides a systematic approach to understanding performance and behavior, including: *Analyzing CPU utilization by the kernel and applications, including reading and understanding hardware counters *Process-level resource usage and profiling *Disk IO behavior and analysis *Memory usage at the system and application level *Network performance *Monitoring and profiling the kernel, and gathering kernel statistics *Using DTrace providers and aggregations *MDB commands and a complete MDB tutorial The Solaris Internals volumes make a superb reference for anyone using Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris.
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Customer Reviews
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A weak companion to Solaris Internals
By A2U4A1O9NND45E on 2006-08-30
A Sun colleague recently noted that the consistency of interfaces in Solaris isn't a strong point, and she's right. Anyone who understands much of Solaris has to manage many odd and subtle details. While the concepts that drive Unix variants are indeed powerful, it doesn't mean every contributing engineer grasps and implements them the same way.
As a result, there are differing views in topic areas like performance management, including: proper methodology, or "best practices"; which statistics are useful and how to interpret them; which reports may be significant, trivial, or misleading; and of course, which tools help you get them. As a contributing author to Sun Microsystem's course on Solaris performance, I heard many of those views from many experienced trainers, Sun engineers, and other interested parties. The complexity of the topic leads many people to believe they understand it "the one way it is supposed to be understood." The passion is great, so long as it doesn't lead to a narrow-minded zeal.
Solaris Performance and Tools punts on such religious matters. In my view there are some good and some disappointing outcomes. The book covers two primary areas. One, it is a detailed looks at programs used to measure system and process performance. The coverage ranges from the obvious and everyday to the highly technical and obscure. Second, there are some brief but helpful introductions to mdb and Dtrace, the killer analysis tool introduced with Solaris 10. This book doesn't often propose a method or application of these tools. It does present what the authors feel are 'the' important ways to measure CPU, disk, and I/O efficiency, but relies more on lots of output from lots of tools, commenting on them only occasionally.
There are a lot of listings: command output, script or C code, grepped output. As with the companion book, Solaris Internals, they are not indexed or captioned. In this book, however, these grey boxes aren't annotated either! They are simply left for the reader to study. This idea of printing a book would bring little more than a shrug ten years ago. There wasn't much else you could do with a closed codebase and so few online references. Has nothing happened to improve on that situation?
The code listings appear in Bourne shell, Perl, Dtrace, or C, so the reader must know how to interpret them all to profit from the discussion. But even for a peer technical reader, some kind of analysis, key-line commentary, or occasional emphasis on nonbovious lines...some help would be nice. I know programmers find commenting a time-consuming chore, but a peer reader could do much of the work this book shows on their own, and spare the trees.
The command-line output does illuminate the discussion, as it should. However, it feels like filler after a ehile when you're reading sample output for ping, traceroute, snoop, output for multiple prstat and ps options, not to mention numerous trivial examples of various process tools, such as pkill and pstop. What are we getting from this? If there was something important to say about them, fine, but again, there's no commenting provided.
The notes on observing CPU, disk and I/O measurements are detail-driven and idiomatic. The focus seems to be on subtlety and non-obvious aspects of statistics that either aren't well-explained in other references, or are widely misinterpreted.
I'm happy for the discussion on mdb and kstats. These are hard subjects to absorb. The online documentation for them is lengthy, hard to gloss, and (of course) poorly-commented where sample code or output is shown. This book gets down to the point and makes the task of learning these tools seem far less daunting.
A key stength of this book is the thorough review of tools and what they do. The book would serves well as a reference when a terminal window is not available. The Dtrace Toolkit is reviewed at length, but there is equally useful coverage and more examples online.
Be advised: the front matter and back matter of this book are the same as the Solaris Internals book, not including the table of contents and index. I mention this because it seemed peculiar that the bibliography for a book on performance, mdb, and dtrace referencesd nothing published in the last six years.
The Bridge Between Knowledge and Understanding: Making Solaris Really Sing
By AP3EH77D1CPKF on 2006-09-14
"Solaris Internals" and its predecessor "Sun Performance and Tuning" are wonderful books for giving you the knowledge to know whats actually happening under the covers, but many SA's admit struggling when it comes to translating that into usable day-to-day understanding of the systems on which they manage. Just knowing how it works isn't enough to be really useful, what you need is the ability to look at the system and work out how what your seeing fits what you know.
"Solaris Performance and Tools" bridges that gap. Every page, cover-to-cover is filled with practical examples and explanations of the tools that let you actually see what Solaris is doing. If you've tended to rely on only a handful of tools such as vmstat, iostat, netstat, sar, and prstat, then you really want to get this book and start digging much deeper. Even as a Sr Admin I found that there were wonderful tools available that I didn't even know existed (such as "intrstat").
In particular, this book unlocks two powerful tools in Solaris 10 that can be as complex as they are powerful: DTrace and mdb. Both of these give you unparalleled power to dig your fingers into the system, but using them beyond simple one liners is more difficult than most people admin. This book gives you a great step-by-step approach to learning both. While a one-line DTrace script found in a blog might help you here and there, you won't truly understand how powerful DTrace can be untill you've built
a firm foundation on which to build your own. This book is the best way to jump start that process.
This truly is the only book available that opens the window to whats possible in Solaris in such a practical way. You'll find things you didn't know, you'll start understanding how things work by putting practical numbers on YOUR system together with the knowledge you aquired from "Solaris Internals" and you'll start solving problems rathan than just knowing why somethings broken or slow.
Every Solaris SA should have a copy of this book on their desk for quick and easy reference. Stop guessing, start knowing.
If you run Solaris you need this book!
By A1TLW4CFJIPYBO on 2006-09-12
This book is a standalone companion to the "Solaris Internals" (2nd Ed) book. Where "Solaris Internals" covers the kernel architecture and theory, this is a practitioners guide that independently introduces, describes and provides indepth examples of Solaris performance monitoring, tracing and debugging tools, including mdb & dtrace.
The descriptions and examples are clear and concise, with enough information being provided for people that want to explore even further or adapt the technologies to their own situations. Chapters and sections are quite independent so you don't need to read the entire book to make sense of the material at the end or explore a particular area.
Readers of varying skill and experience level will find the book equally useful due to the style and skill of the authors. i.e. you could a new sysadmin with no programming experience, or a seasoned kernel developer and find the book valuable in different ways.
It has a clarity rarely seen in technical IT books.
Very highly recommended.
Now you can understand what the tools are reporting
By A35OHOQ0UVOWO7 on 2006-09-09
This book is a great extension to the newly released Solaris Internals book and provides a massive amount of insight into the meaning behind the values that are reported by such tools as sar, vmstat, kstat and so forth.
To get the most benefit out of this book you should already have some understanding of Solaris performance monitoring and will have already used some of the tools that are covered by the book.
But, even without this prior knowledge, you will be able to apply the standard (UNIX) tools as well as make use of the "awesome" DTrace monitoring tool.
Although the book was written by the three main authors and there were several (highly regarded) Sun employees who also contributed to the content, the style of writing and the explanations are not written in a variety of styles. It's almost as though there was just a single author. This makes the book incredibly easy to read.
I would thoroughly recommend this book to anyone who wishes to delve deeper into the workings of Solaris where they need to understand just why problems are being encountered.
As with all UNIX performance management, there are no magic bullets and you won't, necessarily, be able to solve ALL of your performance problems. This book, though, does provide many examples of regulalry-encountered situations and details what caused the problem, how it was identified and which tools helped in the identification. So, this book is A MUST for any serious Solaris administrator's bookshelf.
Every Solaris UNIX admin should get this book !
By A1P4X75K2A3TBS on 2006-09-11
Every Solaris UNIX admin and developer should have a copy of the "Solaris Performance and Tools". It is a must. A unique book out there which does talk in detail about: observability and debugging in Solaris.
I have been with Solaris since 1996, starting to learn its mysteries as a student. I've always missed a book to remind and advice me when I was in trouble. Now we have actually two incredible books which will help you: the Solaris Internals and the Solaris Performance and Tools.
Solaris Performance Tools includes DTrace, the new dynamic tracing environment from Solaris OE and the DTraceToolkit on top of all the other observability and performance tools. The book does talk in details about observability and how to analyze certain situations: like high CPU utilization or saturation, debug certain processes or dtrace a Java virtual machine process. As a bonus the book includes a short guide into MDB a valuable tool for every Solaris geek. In short the book is full of good examples and I would strongly recommend it to any UNIX administrator.
Currently in our operation center we are using the
book on daily basis. My verdict: 5 stars !
Stefan Parvu
- A great geek "how-to" and "how-come?"
By A23A0MCF7RGGS4 on 2006-09-09
I've been working with Solaris for well over a decade, and have reasonable knowledge of some of the idiosycrasies and pitfalls of Solaris (gleaned from working with recalcitrant users and applications), but these two books take it to a whole new level. They've answered many of my "Huh, I wonder why it does that?" questions. They've held my hand through my first forays into some serious performance weirdness, and I envisage using these volumes on a regular basis for years.
Thanks to the authors for helping me achieve a new quanta of geekiness!
- Excellent book on perfomance monitoring and tuning
By A3BBMYICRDBPG7 on 2006-12-12
I been working with solaris for the last 10 years. Some times we had to struggle with performance monitoring and tuning on our highend servers. I think this book gives an excellent opportunity to look back on our architecture and design for the major database and application systems.
- Really good buy
By A2R3UVOE3I74IF on 2007-07-17
It is a really good overview of Solaris performance measuring and tuning tools, along with some good portion of theory and practive of Solaris internals. The only problem is, that it could be longer.
- The 2 books combined equals Theory and Practice! Excellent!
By A3U1RZZPKYSFTN on 2007-09-15
The "Solaris Internals" and "Solaris Performance and Tools" combined to give any UNIX-guru-wannabe the perfect environment to learn and appreciate the Solaris Operating System.
"Solaris Performance and Tools" introduces the tools and utilities available on the latest Solaris release which is Solaris 10 and its simply GREAT ! Its definitely a MUST-HAVE for UNIX administrators.
Btw, it has a great section on using DTrace and MDB which is not too terse but enough to get you started.
"Solaris Internals" introduces the architecture of Solaris and many of its components together with their internals and you can use your knowledge of DTrace and combined it with that gained from this book and build interesting monitoring strategies
- Best Manual Ever
By A2TTPUNGPYT8AA on 2007-12-01
I found this to be one of the best manuals for dtrace, iostat and mdb that I have ever seen. Not only were there good examples but there were lots of them. Why can't these people write the man pages in Solaris?
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