If you're a system administrator looking for some good starting points to tune your Sun Solaris systems on SPARC hardware, then this book is definitely for you. If you're a Linux admin using Intel architecture systems, you may be somewhat disappointed in the Linux coverage provided by the book, but the information and principles covered will still be very useful and universally applicable nonetheless.

The book devotes one chapter to each of the following topics:

• Introduction to Performance Tuning
• Workflow Management
• Processors
• Memory
• Disks
• Disk Arrays
• Networks (with focused coverage of NFS tuning)
• Code Tuning

Each chapter in the book follows a general pattern. First the concepts, theory, and principles of each area of coverage are presented (Computer Science majors will likely have flashbacks to several of their college courses while reading this material. Fortunately it's mainly at review level, and there are no finals to cram for). Occaisionally some history in the development of the particular area is also given, such as in the case of the different hard drive specifications that have emerged. Following the theory are useful descriptions of tools that can be used under Solaris and Linux to tune the particular area, as well as numerous examples of their usage (such as interpretation of the cryptic output of vmstat and iostat).

The book didn't quite provide the depth on each topic that I'd prefer in such a manual, but I think that's due to its breadth. A number of volumes could be written about each chapter topic in the book, and I think recognizing this the authors often provide pointers to other, more in-depth resources where such coverage would be beyond the scope of the text.

You'll want to keep a notebook or highliter handy while reading the book, as you'll almost certainly find something which you can immediately apply to your current situation. Read it while sitting at your command-prompt, otherwise you'll be itching to try out a tip or two until you can get back to your workstation.

For the impatient (or disaster/deadline-driven) types, the last chapter provides a concise summary of the most important topics and tunables from each chapter, but ignore the temptation to read that chapter alone, without the additional coverage and foundational concepts you can get from each chapter.

I found the coverage and examples to be heavily slanted towards tuning of Solaris and Sun hardware, but I guess you would expect that when one of the authors is a Sun Microsystems engineer. It would be nice to see a separate volume that went into the same depth with Linux and the Intel architecture. It's possible that the book is the way it is because the tuning tools and mechanisms available for Linux just haven't reached the same level of maturity yet as in Solaris.

My overall Rating: 8.5/10 (I mainly work with Linux systems on Intel architecture, and occaisionally with Solaris on SPARC hardware. See my first paragraph ;-) The principles and concept coverage are excellent, though.

In conclusion, if you work with Linux or Solaris, and are looking for some high-leverage methods to coax better performance out of your systems, this is one book you'll likely want to read several times, and refer to often.