Solaris System Performance Management (SA-400) class review
I recently spent some time in a Sun class “Solaris System Performance Management“ and wanted to give a brief rundown on my experience.
Pros
- I think the class was helpful in incorporating some performance concepts that I knew about but hadn’t fully baked into my mental model.
- A few of the lab exercises were really good.
- I got to use SWAT (a disk and tape workload analyzer) again and it definitely seemed a smoother experience than when I used it a about a year and a half ago. I’ll definitely put it my bag of tricks. Follow Henk’s blog to stay up to date.
Cons
- There was a lot of material to cover, especially for students without some level of a computer science background
- Some of the labs didn’t work
- The books were last updated in 2006 and while it had some modern touches (DTrace scripts were sprinkled in a few times), you could tell it wasn’t a modern course. I think most of the material was probably written in the late 90s and incrementally updated.
- The instructor wasn’t good about letting students know what parts of the book contained practical advice that they would use frequently versus other aspects which were much more theoretical.
- The instructor wasn’t following the non-OS tools mentioned in the book. For example, SWAT and vdbench are available to all users now (previously it was just Sun employeers and resellers).
Overall Rating
Based on my experience, I wouldn’t give a recommendation for people to take this course. I’m sure there are some instructors that deliver more value than the one I had, but I also think there is much stronger material out there now than the aging textbook. There was a lot of material to cover, and for people without some level of computer science background, it seemed tough. Covering things such as the difference between a “direct-mapped” versus a “set-associative” cache seemed not to be a good use of time when there was still a lot of student misunderstandings about the basic info provided by tools such as vmstat.
What I Recommend
I think a better use of time is to get a copy of the excellent Solaris Performance and Tools book (and potentially the Solaris Internals book as well) and be prepared to spend some time reading through it and trying the tools out on a test machine that has some load on it. Also, take a gander at the Solaris Internals Wiki, which has a lot of great information about performance and tuning of Solaris for a wide variety of sub-systems and situations. For a quick tour around Solaris 10 performance and observability, check out Jim Mauro’s latest presentation.