AIX > Administrator > Performance

Monitor and Fine-Tune Performance With Clever AIX Commands

Performance is important. I can’t break it down any simpler than that. It’s the bread and butter for every server shop—saving time, money and headaches down the road. With a few simple commands, you can keep your eye on performance. This will keep your bosses happy by avoiding equipment purchases you might not need; your application/DBAs happy by running the most efficient machines; and yourself happy by storing a little bit of slick knowledge in the back of your head.

Let’s chat a little bit about AIX performance tools. AIX has some of the best performance tools out there. No other OS can match how easy it is to get a clear picture of what’s going on “under the hood” of your system. Buying a high performance system from IBM and not tuning it is like buying a Corvette and putting apple juice in the gas tank. Performance tools on AIX include:

nmon
iostat
mpstat
sar
vmstat
entstat
fcstat
lparstat
curt
svmon
topas
tprof
pprof
netpmon


This article won’t describe each of these tools in detail. However, you can find an illuminating description of each command by typing man on an AIX server. You can also find more commands at the IBM Information Center.

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