Managing Systems and Workgroups: A Guide for HP-UX System Administrators

Administering a System: Managing Printers, Software, and Performance
Managing System Performance
Chapter 7726
Managing System Performance
This section provides some guidelines and suggestions for improving the
performance of a system or workgroup.
• “Performance Bottlenecks” on page 726
• “Guidelines” on page 727
• “Measuring Performance” on page 729
• “Making Changes” on page 734
Performance Bottlenecks
A system may perform slowly or sluggishly for a variety of reasons, and
you may need to do considerable investigation to determine the source of
bottlenecks on a given system. You need to consider the
interrelationships between the different components of the system, not
just its individual components. Start with the tools described under
“Measuring Performance” on page 729.
Once you’ve isolated a performance problem and you decide how to
address it, change only one thing at a time. If you change more than one
thing, you will not know which change helped performance. It’s also
possible that one change will improve performance while another makes
it worse, but you won’t know that unless you implement them separately
and measure performance in between.
The following shows some possible system bottlenecks:
CPU Bottlenecks: • Many background processes running at a high priority consuming a
lot of CPU time, or a “runaway” process. If response time is
unacceptable, lower the priority of some processes, and kill any
unwanted processes.
Memory
Bottlenecks:
• high deactivations
• high paging activity
• little or no free memory available
• high CPU usage in System mode