Perfbar is a visual tool that is very valuable when determining bottle necks on SMP servers. It serves as an indicator for single threaded applications. Such tools as mpstat are much more precise but far from less intuitive. Removing this bottle neck of a single thread which is CPU bound in an application is very important to exploit all CPU resources of a SMP server.
Ralph Bogendörfer, Solaris Performance Engineer, is currently working to extend the perfbar. Version 1.2 allows the monitoring of massive parallel CMT servers through an improved layout. The traditional look showed bars for all CPUs in a row like the one for a 16 way server below.
CacheFS is a hidden feature deep inside of Solaris. It is considered similar to a caching proxy, but it doesn't cache web pages, it caches files from another filesystem. Joerg Moellenkamp has a series of tutorials on hidden features of Solaris, and his latest edition is an 8 part walk through of CacheFS and how it works.
Sun Installation Assistant (SIA) helps install supported Linux (Red Hat and SUSE) and Microsoft Windows operating systems on Sun x64 servers. SIA also makes firmware updates automatic on some servers. SIA makes OS installation easy. With SIA, all that is needed to begin is a licensed copy of Linux or Windows OS distribution media supported for a particular server. All Sun software and required server-specific drivers are supplied by SIA. With a graphical wizard interface and flexible installation options, SIA brings simplicity, speed and reliability to server deployments.
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