Solaris Internals, Tuning and Planning

Instructors: Adrian Cockcroft and Richard McDougall

Purpose

This 5-day course presents memory management and performance tuning techniques for Solaris 2.6 through 9 from two of Sun Microsystem's leading experts.

Dates

Check the schedule for the latest information.
Online registration is available. Additional registration details are provided at the end of this page.

Who Should Attend

UNIX sysadms, mainframe sysprogs, performance engineers, consultants, IT technical managers and software development engineers.

Course Structure

Class begins at 9am and ends at 5pm each day. A morning break of half an hour is serviced at 10:30am Seated Lunch service is provided from Noon until 1pm. A serviced afternoon break of half an hour occurs at 3:00pm

The presentation format consist of two days of content by Richard McDougall based on his Solaris Internals book with updates to include more information on the latest developments in Solaris 9 and memory systems. This will be interleaved with two days of updated content by Adrian Cockcroft on performance tuning, capacity planning and measurement tools. One day will be presented as a joint workshop based on input from attendees, who are encouraged to bring their own specific problems to be explored.

Day 1: Internals Part (I): Virtual Memory and File Systems

Instructor: Richard McDougall

Basic Virtual Memory Architecture
Swap Space
Advanced Virtual Memory
File System Interface

Day 2: Internals Part (II): The Process Model

Instructor: Richard McDougall

Processes and Threads
Scheduling
Synchronization
System Calls
Kernel monitoring tools: mdb, trapstat, lockstat analysis

Day 3: Sun Systems Performance and Tuning

Instructor: Adrian Cockcroft

Material from Sun Performance and Tuning - Java and the Internet updated to cover new features of Solaris 7, 8, 9 and the UltraSPARC III based Sun Blade 1000 and Sun Fire 3800 to 6800 range of systems.
Tutorial on monitoring and tuning TCP/IP networks
Automatic workload bottleneck detection via analysis of process data and system level heath monitoring rules a.k.a. Virtual Adrian
Capacity Planning for high growth rate Internet services. Includes a special focus on complex disk subsystems, and a simple spreadsheet based model for capacity planning

Day 4: Performance Tools and Examples

Instructors: Richard and Adrian

Performance Tools in Solaris and Changes for Solaris 9
SE toolkit overview and how to code your own tools and rules
Workload Analysis for Resource Management, Data sources, analysis techniques and tools issues for large and complex systems
TNF tracing
Hardware monitoring:
1. cpustat: explore memory hierarchy of UltraSPARC
2. busstat: multiprocessor coherency, memory and bus
3. har: hardware monitoring for mortals
Memory tools and examples:
1. memory sizing
2. paging dynamics
3. file system caching

Day 5: Attendee-Oriented Interactive Workshop

Instructors: Richard and Adrian

Explore issues raised by the attendees during the week
Work on specific problem cases brought to the class
Develop and modify new performance rules
Catch up on any gaps or material skipped due to overruns

Instructors

Adrian Cockcroft

Adrian graduated from The City University, London in 1982, with a B.Sc. in Applied Physics and Electronics. He worked for six years as a software engineer and Sun system administrator before joining Sun UK as a Systems Engineer in 1988, and built a reputation as a specialist in SPARC and performance related issues.

In 1993 he transferred to what later became known as Sun's Enterprise Engineering group in California. In 1995 Adrian wrote the definitive reference book: Sun Performance and Tuning and followed up with a second edition in 1998. He is also a co-author of the Sun Blueprint Book on Resource Management published by Sun Press in 1999 and more recently a Sun BluePrint on Capacity Planning for Internet Services. The Sunworld Online magazine published a monthly performance Q&A column by Adrian from 1995 to 1999 at www.sunworld.com.

In 1999 Adrian became a Distinguished Engineer at Sun, and transferred to the Performance Applications Engineering group that is now part of Sun's new Integrated Products organization. With Rich Pettit, Adrian develops the SE performance toolkit that includes an experimental system monitor called virtual-adrian. In his spare time Adrian is into cars and music. His book has a picture of a Porsche 911 on the cover and for a while he had that car. Currently he lives in San Jose, CA with a 1975 Fiat Spider and a 1973 Citroen/Maserati SM.

Richard McDougall

Richard is an senior engineer in the Performance and Availability Engineering Group at Sun Microsystems where he focuses on large system performance and operating system architecture. He has more than 12 years of performance tuning, application/kernel development, and capacity planning experience on many different flavors of Unix.

Richard has authored a wide range of papers and tools for measurement, monitoring, tracing and sizing of Unix systems including the memory sizing methodology for Sun, the set of tools known as MemTool allowing fine-grained instrumentation of memory for Solaris, the recent priority paging memory algorithms in Solaris and man of the unbundled Tools for Solaris. Richard co-authored the Sun Microsystems book, Solaris Internals with Jim Mauro, and the Resource Management Sun Blueprint with Adrian Cockcroft et al.

Terms and Conditions

Tuition Fee

See class schedule page for current pricing. Early Bird: if registered 14 days in advance of the course. Enroll online now!

Discounts

Corporate discounts for THREE (3) or more people from the same company are also available. Enquire when you book. Once a seat is booked, a penalty of $500 will be imposed for a one-time transfer of that seat to another session date. Inability to attend after such a one-time transfer will automatically forfeit the entire registration fee.

Refunds

Requests for refunds must be received in writing at least 14 days before the start date of the course. Substitutions may be made at any time.

Transportation

Information will be sent upon receipt of enrollment. A packet will include airport and transportation options.

Reservations

Enrollment is limited to 80 students. All confirmed reservations must be must be accompanied by a purchase order number, a check for the tuition, or credit card information for billing. Courtesy Reservations will be held for up to 30 days in order for paperwork to be processed so long as there is suffcient time and adequate space in thecourse.

Textbooks

A copy of each of the following texts is included in the price of admission:

Sun Performance and Tuning by Adrian Cockcroft and Richard Pettit, Prentice Hall, 1999.
Solaris Internals by Jim Mauro and Richard McDougall, Prentice Hall, 2000.

Sorry, no refunds can be given if you already have a copy of the books.

Location: Crowne Plaza Hotel

All instruction takes place in the seminar ballrooms at the Crowne Plaza Hotel 11950 Dublin Canyon Rd, in PLEASANTON, California (near the intersection of the 580 and 680 freeways). The city of Pleasanton is right next door to Castro Valley. There are no hotels in the unincorporated city of Castro Valley.

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Please note: You must book your own hotel room with the Crowne by calling (925)847-6000

Accommodations

A block of rooms has been set aside for Solaris Internals students at a special corporate rate. Students must make their own reservations by calling (925)847-6000 and identifying themselves as a Performance Dynamics enrollee. You cannot book a room online at this special rate. You must call the hotel and tell'em we sent you.

Meals

Breakfast, lunch, morning and afternoon breaks will be catered for by the hotel each day. See the Mini Survival Guide explaining how to get to the hotel and a list of local restaurants to eat at, once you do.

Travel Tips

If you decide to take the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) train, call the Crowne Plaza (925)847-6000 from the train on your cellphone and they will pick you up at the Pleasanton BART-station (not the Castro Valley station) and shuttle you to the hotel.

People coming from the 'Right' Coast may want to check air fares at JetBlue. Last May 2001, some students flew from New York to Oakland direct for $300 return.

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On 21 Jan 2003, 11:23.