23 July, 2006

Solaris Internals 2nd Edition - available!

Great news! Solaris Internals 2nd Edition is now available to purchase from sites such as Amazon. Amazon writes "Availability: Usually ships within 24 hours" - so in less than a day (I imagine a business day, if you are in the US), you could be holding this landmark book.

I've studied this edition from cover to cover, and it is incredible to see such a wide range of topics covered well, and at such a unique depth. It is the reference for the Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris kernel, and is written in an endearing way that makes this enormous topic very approachable.

I can't wait to get my hard copy of this book. I really enjoyed studying the content the first time, and I'll really enjoy revisiting the chapters.

18 July, 2006

DTrace Slides

The slides I used for the recent DTrace Workshop in London have been put online by Context-Switch. This DTrace presentation covers my own method of teaching DTrace, which begins with a summary of performance monitoring tools in Solaris 9 and their limitations.

The slides also document many of the strategies I use for DTrace analysis, and is the first time they have been listed together online. They are,

DTrace Strategies
  1. Snoop or Summary

  2. Drill Down Analysis

  3. Frequency Count

  4. Known Count

  5. Aggregate Stacks

  6. Elapsed Time

  7. On-CPU Time

  8. Milestones

See chapters 5 and 10 from the slides for details.

The slides are used in conjunction with additional live demonstrations and student labs. They also assume that the almost released book, Solaris Performance and Tools can be used as a reference.