What is a Unix sysadmin doing with an iPhone, you ask? It was a birthday present, if that’s all right with you. I know, I should have gotten something odd with a beta version of …

I am sure this will sound familiar: you are copying a large amount of data – either locally or over the network – and you are wondering how long it will take and if there is a way to make things go faster.You may be surprised, but it does matter what type of files you are copying: 1Gb-worth of many small files will take considerably longer to copy than two 500Mb files. The hardware you are using is an important consideration, but it’s not the only factor limiting data transfer speed.

Bonnie++ is a benchmark utility designed to test performance of hard drives and filesystems by simulating various types of disk I/O. Bonnie++ may be used to test local disks as well as network-mounted filesystems. It …

When you look at the CPU activity of your computer, one of the parameters is the iowait. This value shows how much time your CPU wastes while it is waiting for I/O operations for complete. …

Linux Performance Tuning
April | May 2007 | by Jaqui Lynch
Note: This is the second article in a two-part series. The first installment was published in the February/March issue.
In last issue’s article I introduced basic Linux* …

In the Spring of 2005 Comcast experienced a major DNS outage. Since then many Comcast users have switched to DNS servers that belong to Verizon and other ISPs. Comcast started taking a lot of flak …

This article contains examples of using prstat to monitor CPU and memory utilization by individual processes and groups of processes.
Example 1: Show CPU and memory usage by all processes called “*ora_smon_imanax*”
The following prstat command will …