Linux® and Windows® Interoperability Guide

Programming Techniques for Observing Performance

Now that we have some tools for observing programs, we can learn something about the characteristics of our operating systems. We will look at only three areas, and in a very cursory manner. In successive order we will look at memory transfer rates, file system read and write rates, and raw disk IO rates. The point of this analysis is to demonstrate methods for characterizing the performance of the underlying platform. Such an understanding is critical to understanding higher level performance issues. When a Web server cannot deliver more transactions, understanding the operating system's context switch capabilities and socket throughput capabilities will go a long way toward explaining performance ...