You can take a variety of approaches to performance analysis on your system. These choices range from quick snapshots that take but a few seconds to create, to long-range capacity planning programs that you may want to run for weeks or months before you even begin to analyze the data they produce. This chapter contains examples from a variety of systems, including HP-UX 11i systems. I left in the examples from non-HP-UX systems because some readers of my books are coming from UNIX variants other than HP-UX. Most of the HP-UX examples in this chapter have been updated to reflect 11i systems, however, I'm not aware of any differences between these performance examples on 11i vs. 11.0.
In this chapter, we'll focus on some commonly used UNIX commands and a couple of advanced tools that run on several UNIX variants. These are by no means an exhaustive list of UNIX commands and tools related to performance management; however, I provide enough good information to give you an overview. Your UNIX system may support additional commands and have advanced performance analysis tools. This chapter will give a good overview of performance analysis, including examples of the most commonly used UNIX performance-related commands.
