AIX system performance experiences and basic tuning

Recent conversion from a Mainframe environment to AIX/UNIX presented many interesting challenges. Learning the AIX/UNIX operating system from manuals alone was not enough. Fortunately, many of the fundamental performance tuning principles learned in the mainframe environment applied well in the sense that you are still balancing CPU, memory, and I/O. Encountering real world system performance issues was the key to a better understanding of system behavior. As such, much of this paper is derived from personal experiences in extensive tuning of AIX systems. The intent of this paper is to help make the switch from MAINFRAME to AIX/UNIX a bit friendlier for the Performance Specialist.