Monday July 12, 2004

Performance analysis Ever tried to analyse the output of iostat, netstat, nfsstat, vmstat, etc., to work out just what a Solaris system is doing?

A few months ago I was pointed towards dim_STAT, a browser-based front end that takes all that info and graphs it in charts, histograms, etc., to help analyse a problem for a customer. It helped a lot, both I and the customer now understand a lot more about the behaviour of the system we were looking at.

dim_STAT can be downloaded externally at http://dimitrik.free.fr/ It's not a Sun product, nor Sun-supported, but is written by one of the guys who works on benchmarking in Paris and he gives a pretty good turnaround on questions. It doesn't do all the analysis, in the way that the SE toolkit does, and you'll still need Adrian Cockroft's Performance and Tuning book to hand, but dim_STAT presents all the important info in a very readable format. You can easily compare, for example, network load, CPU oaod and disk load, all on a single chart

I've only tried it on Solaris/SPARC, but as far as I know it runs on Solaris/x86 and on Linux. (2004-07-12 08:15:56.0) Permalink

Live Upgrade I used to be the sort of techy person that would play with any new feature as soon as it was available, but these days I haven't the time. At least, that's my excuse for not having tried Live Upgrade on Solaris before. On Friday I wanted to upgrade my desktop to a more recent S10 build, and not wanting to be without it for half the day I tried LU for the first time.

Wow!

I don't think I've found any command with as high a functionality:namelength ratio before! Just type lu, and up comes a menu. A few taps on a keyboard, type in the path to the packages, <enter> once or twice, and its ready. A couple of hours later, reboot, and the upgrade is done with almost no downtime. Even the inevitable tidying up, to restore my customizations, is easy when I can have each environment side-by-side in terminal windows.

Now, I always knew, intellectually speaking, that LU was supposed to be that easy, but actually seeing it happen so smoothly is just amazing.

Hey guys, this is neat! (2004-07-12 05:49:37.0) Permalink