Computer Performance Evaluation for UNIX

What has been standard production resource usage and capacity management practices for most mainframe shops is not in common practice in many UNIX based distributed processing shops. There are several reasons why the UNIX shops, while running on the hottest architectures and latest graphical user interfaces, have been the "backward cousins" in relation to the mainframe shops in this area. The foremost reason is because only recently have a significant number of UNIX systems moved into large production environments that necessitate performance and capacity management. The most common usage of UNIX systems to date has been by engineers and white collar professionals that have workstations that are minimally dependent on other systems in the network [1]. When there was contention for a shared resource, it usually involved a small number of users and a single server. In general terms, the environments while distributed. did not have complex dependencies for resources shared by a large number of users. In the "traditional" UNIX environment nothing needed to be done relating to resource usage and capacity planning until a system became so slow it could no longer be tolerated. Today, however, while running IS applications that are very imponant and have time critical processing requirements, it is unacceptable to blindly reach the point were production drops to a snail's pace before taking action.