"The Solaris™Internals volumes are simply the best and most comprehensive treatment of the Solaris (and OpenSolaris) Operating Environment. Any person using Solaris--in any capacity--would be remiss not to include these two new volumes in their personal library. With advanced observability tools in Solaris (like DTrace), you will more often find yourself in what was previously unchartable territory. Solaris™ Internals, Second Edition, provides us a fantastic means to be able to quickly understand these systems and further explore the Solaris architecture--especially when coupled with OpenSolaris source availability."

--Jarod Jenson, chief systems architect, Aeysis

"The Solaris™ Internals volumes by Jim Mauro and Richard McDougall must be on your bookshelf if you are interested in in-depth knowledge of Solaris operating system internals and architecture. As a senior Unix engineer for many years, I found the first edition of Solaris™ Internals the only fully comprehensive source for kernel developers, systems programmers, and systems administrators. The new second edition, with the companion performance and debugging book, is an indispensable reference set, containing many useful and practical explanations of Solaris and its underlying subsystems, including tools and methods for observing and analyzing any system running Solaris 10 or OpenSolaris."

--Marc Strahl, senior UNIX engineer

Solaris™ Performance and Tools provides comprehensive coverage of the powerful utilities bundled with Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris, including the Solaris Dynamic Tracing facility, DTrace, and the Modular Debugger, MDB. It provides a systematic approach to understanding performance and behavior, including:

• Analyzing CPU utilization by the kernel and applications, including reading and understanding hardware counters

• Process-level resource usage and profiling

• Disk IO behavior and analysis

• Memory usage at the system and application level

• Network performance

• Monitoring and profiling the kernel, and gathering kernel statistics

• Using DTrace providers and aggregations

• MDB commands and a complete MDB tutorial

The Solaris™ Internals volumes make a superb reference for anyone using Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 14 Ratings

Best Manual Ever - 2007-12-01
Reviewer Rating:
I found this to be one of the best manuals for dtrace, iostat and mdb that I have ever seen. Not only were there good examples but there were lots of them. Why can't these people write the man pages in Solaris?

You need this book in your library for sure - 2009-01-29
Reviewer Rating:
I will make this as short as I can, unlike the one for the companion book, Solaris Internals. I have been troubleshooting Sun Solaris for 15 years, in one version or another. Crash dump analysis was the main way to get data from within the kernel and only if the system blew a gasket. There have been different methods through the years,crash, kdb, and mdb are the main ones, but now with Solaris 10 you can add a powerful tool to your knowledge tool box, DTrace. This is built in to the system code so its not a seperate program that you run, it lives in Solaris and you enable the probes you want to see. Interpreting the data is not easy if you dont know what you are looking at, so the Companion book tells you what the internal workings are so you can know what you are looking at. This book tells you how to find the most used issues or problems. It covers these things in more detail than you can find unless you work in and engineering lab and program apps for Solaris. Solaris 10 has many things in it that can throw an admin, Zones for instance, can throw you if you are having some type of performance issue, but what can you do to get the data from the kernel to watch the internal processes deep under the hood? DTrace should be the first thing out of your mouth. This is a top notch book and I understand other people's issues or questions with it, however, assume you have not touched Solaris 10 in production and your company is doing a technology refresh and migration to new Sun Hardware and Solaris 10. How are you going to help your company troubleshoot issues in this new envrionment? You will use DTrace and any other tools you can. I use DTrace almost every day. I did today.

So if you want to know how Dtrace and mdb and other utility commands are used, buy this book and sit down on a Solaris 10 box and start typing. If you want to see other people's take on it, go to one of the Author's web sites. Brendan Gregg. You can look him up on the web. This is a fine fine add on book and I have two copies of it too. One at home and one in my book bag. It is one of my top 10 carried books when I travel.

Kudo's to Brendan, Rich, and Jim.

Thanks and keep up the good work.


Sincerely

Bill Branson

An excellent reference book - 2008-07-06
Reviewer Rating:
A surprisingly good book from Sun considering how poorly I think of mdb as a development tool. If you are forced to work with Solaris then this is a must have for your bookshelf.

valuable reference - 2008-06-20
Reviewer Rating:
If you need to dig into the internals of Solaris for any reason, this book is a must have, especially for the dtrace and mdb tools which are very powerful but powerfully complex. I use the book as a constant reference for mdb.

I didn't rate it the highest though because it is somewhat inconsistent in the level of explanation offered. Some topics explained thoroughly and others leave one wanting a better explanation.

Nevertheless, it's the only resource of it's kind.

The perfect companion for Solaris Internals - 2008-03-24
Reviewer Rating:
If you have bought Solaris Internals, this book is a must because it will take to the practice many of the information given in the other one.

I really like the part which talks about optimizing Java procesess, which is useful even if you're not running Solaris (though not all applies). It made me optimize a lot my servers.

Of course, i would recommend this book to any one interested in optimizing the performance of Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris.

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