The First 10 Tuning Steps

(1) The system will usually have a disk bottleneck
(2) You will be told that the system, is not I/O bound
(3) After first pass tuning the system will still have a disk bottleneck!
(4) Poor NFS response times are hard to pin down
(5) Avoid the common memory usage misconceptions (See "Understanding Vmstat Output")
(6) Don't panic when you see page-ins and page-out in vmstat
(7) Look for page scanner activity (See "The Paging Algorithm In Solairs2")
(8) Look for a lang run queue (vmstat procs r) (See "Understanding Vmstat On A Multiprocessor")
(9) Look for processes blocked waiting for I/O (vmstat proc b)
(10) Look for CPU system time dominating user time (See "Tracing In Solaris 2",
"Monitoring The System With Protocol", "Kernel Profiling Using kgmon In Solaris 2")