Pinpointing System Performance Issues

The explosive growth of the Internet in recent years has created a heretofore unprecedented demand for system performance. In many cases, system administrators have been left scrambling, trying to understand the performance issues raised by the loads and new technologies they are facing. This paper suggests methods for analyzing system performance potential, prioritizing the search for bottlenecks and identifying problem areas. While many of the specific tuning suggestions are particular to BSD/OS and other 4.4BSD derivatives, the principles on which they are based should generalize well to any system being used to provide Internet services.