Performance tuning case studies

We have provided several case studies that you can use as starting points for your own investigations. Each study is discussed in terms of the five steps described in ``Tuning methodology'':

1. Define a performance goal for the system.

2. Collect data to get a general picture of how the system is behaving.

3. Formulate a hypothesis based on your observations.

4. Get more specifics to enable you to test the validity of your hypothesis.

5. Make adjustments to the system, and test the outcome of these. If necessary, repeat steps 2 to 5 until your goal is achieved.

• memory-bound workstation

• memory-bound software development system

• I/O-bound multiuser system

• unbalanced disk activity on a database server

• semaphore activity on a database server

• intermittently poor network performance