DEC OSF/1 System Tuning and Performance Management

This document is the "System Tuning and Performance Management" manual for the DEC OSF/1 operating system (Version 2.0, dated February 1994). It is designed to assist system administrators and programmers in identifying and resolving performance bottlenecks.

The manual is organized into three chapters:

• Chapter 1 (Overview): Covers the underlying components of the operating system that affect performance, including Alpha AXP 64-bit architecture, process management, memory management (virtual memory and the Unified Buffer Cache), and I/O subsystems (disk and network).
• Chapter 2 (Monitoring): Details the tools available for diagnosing performance issues, such as iostat, netstat, nfsstat, ps, uptime, vmstat, dbx, and various file system monitoring commands. It provides examples of how to interpret data from these tools to pinpoint issues like high CPU usage, excessive paging, or disk/network bottlenecks.
• Chapter 3 (Tuning): Provides specific guidelines for optimizing applications (compilation, linking, and coding strategies), tuning CPU utilization, memory management, interprocess communication, and I/O subsystems (including UFS, AdvFS, and Network File System tuning).

The manual also includes a comprehensive index and instructions for ordering additional documentation.