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IBM publication can help fix AIX performance problems

When users report a system is running slowly, it can be hard to know where to start looking. Considering all the physical and logical components that make up a well-running system, addressing performance problems can be overwhelming. How do you work out where the bottleneck is?

First, there are some basic questions you can ask:

• What exactly are the symptoms?
• Is the problem restricted to a single user, one application, or just the one virtual server?
• Has anything changed in the configuration recently?
• Is the performance degradation sudden, or has it been gradual over days, weeks or even months?
• Is the system under-configured for the workload?

These are just a few of the basic questions that go to dealing with performance problems. There are many tools, utilities, blogs and articles, which can help you shed light on why a system might be running slower than expected—and what to do about it. One particularly good resource is the IBM publication, AIX 7.1 Performance Management.

This publication has a wealth of material on system performance. The initial section on the basics of performance gives a high-level view, with some helpful guidelines on system workload, performance objectives, the hardware hierarchy, software hierarchy and system tuning.

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