Summary

This chapter provided information about a number of Linux performance tools currently availablenamely, CPU tools, memory tools, I/O tools, and network tools. This set of tools provides information for understanding the utilization of system resources under a certain workload. Some of the tools can also reveal the system activities in user space. This chapter described the data provided by the tools and how they can be used in performance analysis.

Most of the basic tool features needed for performance analysis are available through existing tools. However, there is a need for additional tools to provide a better understanding of traffic, including process migration and remote memory access among nodes in NUMA systems. In addition, there is a need for tools that can store and display performance data in a variety of views to help developers understand, navigate, and tune the kernel or user applications. One such tool is gnuplot. The displayed data should have various levels of compactness to support different levels of data density, especially those involved with multithreaded or SMP machines where data tends to be complex and multidimensional. Performance tools are crucial for helping advance Linux into the enterprise system market.