Who Should Read This Book?

This book helps Linux software developers, system administrators, and end users to use the Linux performance tools to find the performance problems in a given system. Beginning performance investigators learn the basics of performance investigation and analysis. Medium to advanced performance investigators, especially those with performance experience on other proprietary operating systems, learn about the Linux equivalents of commands from other systems with which they may already be familiar.

Software developers learn how to pinpoint the exact line of source code that causes a performance problem. System administrators who are performance tuning a system learn about the tools that show why a system is slowing down, and they can then use that information to tune the system. Finally, although not the primary focus of the book, end users learn the basic skills necessary to figure out which applications are consuming all the system resources.