Sun Performance and Tuning: Java™ and the Internet, Second Edition

Standards and Implementations

There are well-defined, portable standards for the many Unix programming interfaces. The System V Interface Definition, POSIX, and X/Open Unix95 all tie down various aspects of the system so that application programs can be moved among systems by recompilation. Beneath these interfaces lie implementations that have a common ancestry but that are diverging rapidly as each Unix vendor seeks to gain a feature, performance, or scalability advantage. Although the interface is well defined, the performance-oriented behavior and limitations are not closely defined. For management of the performance of an implementation, implementation-specific metrics are collected and provided to performance management tools. Some of ...