Who should attend: Novice and advanced UNIX system and network administrators and developers concerned about network perform ance impacts. A basic understanding of the UNIX system facilities and network environments is assumed.

What you will learn: Procedures and techniques for tuning systems, networks and application code.

Starting from the single system view, we will examine how the virtual memory system, the I/O system and file system can be measured and optimized. We'll extend the single-host view to include Network File System tuning and performance strategies.

Detailed treatment of networking perfor mance problems, including network design and media choices, will lead to examples of network capacity planning. Application issues, such as system call optimization, memory usage and monitoring, code profiling, real-time programming, and techniques for controlling response time will be addressed. Many examples will be given, along with guidelines for capacity planning and custom ized monitoring based of your workloads and traffic patterns. Question and analysis periods for particular situations will be provided.

Topics include:

- Performance tuning strategies (practical goals, monitoring intervals, useful stats, tools)
- Server tuning (file system and disk tuning, memory consumption, and swap space, systems resource monitoring)
- NFS performance tuning (server constraints, client improvements, NFS over WANs, automounter, and other tricks)
- Network performance, design, and capacity planning (locating bottlenecks, demand management, media choices and protocols, network topologies, throughput and latency considerations, and modeling resource usage)
- Application tuning (system resource usage, memory allocation, code profiling, job scheduling and queuing, real-time issues, and managing response time)

Hal Stern is a Distinguished Systems Engineer with Sun Microsystems Computer Company, where he focuses on high-end server technology, operations management, networking, performance tuning, and information systems architecture. Hal has been a UNIX administrator and user for more than ten years. He is the author of Managing NFS & NIS and the author of several articles on application performance and network design.

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