Using Existing Instrumentation For System Performance Tuning

This work presents a new measurement methodology especially designed to improve the performance of interactive systems as perceived by the user (user-perceived performance). It uses heuristics and system performance tools to the diagnosis of bottlenecks and provides the necessary remedies to achieve acceptable computer performance. The technique relies on a high level functional model of the interaction between application workloads, the UNIX operating system, and system hardware. Current performance measurement and tuning techniques suffer from a multitude of problems when applied to interactive systems. Our reliance on these techniques for interactive system performance tuning has caused the systems to be tuned in a suboptimal manner with systems often failing to provide predictable performance