Brendan Gregg and Roch Bourbonnais share the thought process they use to troubleshoot system performance problems.
Deirdré Straughan on Italy, India, the Internet, the world, and now Australia
Brendan Gregg and Roch Bourbonnais share the thought process they use to troubleshoot system performance problems.
An example of experimentation is here: http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/performance_testing_the_7000_series3 – where system limits are found by applying load from very simple tools. The tools themselves, seqread.pl and randread.pl, are examples of small experiments that can be studied and understood before encountering such workloads in a more complex environment.