Solaris Performance and Tools: Dtrace and Mdb Techniques for Solaris 10 and Opensolaris

"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.

Richard McDougall is a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, specializing in operating systems technology and systems performance.

Jim Mauro is a Senior Staff Engineer in the Performance, Architecture, and Applications Engineering group at Sun Microsystems, where his most recent efforts have focused on Solaris performance on Opteron platforms.

Brendan Gregg is a Solaris consultant and instructor teaching classes for Sun Microsystems across Australia and Asia. He is also an OpenSolaris contributor and community leader, and has written numerous software packages, including the DTraceToolkit.