Q: What upcoming conferences cover performance management and are you presenting at any of them?

A: In early December, there are two large conferences happening at the same time. LISA '98 in Boston is a Usenix-sponsored systems administration conference, and CMG98 in Anaheim, CA is the Computer Measurement Group's annual conference. Both run the week of December 6; I'll be at CMG98. I just returned from presenting an all-day Sun performance and tuning tutorial at SANE '98, run by the Netherlands Unix User Group (NLUUG) at Maastricht, and I'll be presenting again at the Nordic EurOpen/Usenix conference in Stockholm, Sweden, February 9 to 12, 1999.

SANE '98

The first International SANE (Systems Administration and Networking) conference was well attended, and I gave an all-day tutorial on Sun performance tuning to a room full of people from all over Europe and the US. The rest of the conference had a strong emphasis on security-related issues, and apart from meeting some Sun users, I got to know people who are working on developing FreeBSD and Linux. An impressive range of speakers presented, including Bill Cheswick, Phil Zimmerman, and Rob Kolstad, among others. Among the highlights of the conference was a paper on Internet packet delay measurements -- you can get more information on this from http://www.ripe.net/test-traffic/index.html.

CMG98

CMG started out as a mainframe-centric organization, but nowadays it covers every kind of system you would find in a high-end data center environment and specializes in performance management and capacity planning for mainframes, Unix systems, and Windows NT. This year, Sun will have a strong presence at CMG98, with an exhibitor's booth and with Sun folks presenting several papers and a keynote speech. I'm also copresenting a preconference workshop on TCP performance, which will include a tutorial introduction to TCP/IP and detail how to measure and tune it on Unix, Windows NT, and mainframes.

Greg Papadopoulos, Sun's chief technology officer, will be presenting a keynote speech,
Resource Management for Unix in the Data Center.

Paper abstracts

You can view the agenda at the CMG Web site (http://www.cmg.org), so I'll just highlight the papers slated to be presented by Sun engineers.

Managing the Unix Mainframe -- Adrian Cockcroft

For many years the mainframe has been the highest capacity system
available. In the last few years high-end, Unix-based servers have
grown extremely fast, and the highest capacity has crossed
over to the Unix server. This applies to raw CPU power, memory size,
DASD capacity, and I/O rates. These Unix systems must address
high-end availability and performance management issues, but can the
Unix-based performance management tools cope?

CPU Time Measurement Errors -- Adrian Cockcroft

The most common method of measuring CPU time in Unix is to sample
the state of each CPU at each clock interrupt and accumulate
global and per-process counters. The hope is that sampling theory
will cause the average values to be accurate over time.
Unfortunately, sampling theory requires an unbiased sample, and the
clock interrupt is also used to schedule process wake-ups. This bias
causes large errors to accumulate, particularly for the CPU time
used

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