Linux Performance Tuning and Capacity Planning

• Jason R Fink & Matthew D. Sherer
• Sams
• 0672320819

Order (or just read more about) Linux Performance Tuning and Capacity Planning  from Amazon.com

Strangely, there's a review of this at Amazon that complains about the book being too general, not Linux specific. In fact, it is very Linux specific. Yes, of course there is general information here that could be applied to any Unix system. But there's much, much more.

An entire chapter is devoted to X Window performance with particular attention to single-user desktop systems- probably exactly where you are apt to be concerned about X performance. Of course, much of this would apply to any Unix running X, but XFree86 is the specific focus. Another chapter deals with network performance, and covers with Samba, NFS, serving Web pages and the like, which is certainly rather generic- but the specific discussion of changes under /proc/sys/net are certainly very Linux specific. There's a very Linux specific section on kernel configuration and tuning, the disk configuration section talks about Linux specific file systems, and so on- I really don't know what book that reviewer read, but it couldn't have been this.

Of course, things could be better. This is rather short- under 300 pages, and it is true that more space is devoted to generalities than specifics. But until I find something better, I'll definitely be referring to this as the need arises.