Rating: 
Summary: only if you're just starting out
Review: After reading the other reviews I had high hopes for this book. The book is not geared to people that already have basic sysadmin skills. And in one case the book makes a rather dubious statement. They list a few ndd parameters and state "The other values should never be changed on a production system." Well, they left out tcp_ip_abort_cinterval. And they don't mention tcp_ip_abort_linterval at all which so far seems to be an undocumented Sun Microsystems parameter. A book about tuning should cover all the tunable parameters and explain cause/effect. Simply stating that you never change the other parameters without explaining why isn't why you buy a book on Performance and Tuning. If you're just starting out with Sun administration and do not know a lot of the unix commands to administer and monitor a Solaris box this book will help. The book does cover much of the basics and background that someone starting out needs. The book does leave out a number of higher level concepts and doesn't cover all tunable parameters so it doesn't really help much beyond already available text/webpages which you'll still have to research and scour to really learn the whole story on Solaris performance and tuning. But if you already know some of what you're doing you're money is better kept in your pocket.
Rating:
Summary: only if you're just starting out
Review: After reading the other reviews I had high hopes for this book. The book is not geared to people that already have basic sysadmin skills. And in one case the book makes a rather dubious statement. They list a few ndd parameters and state "The other values should never be changed on a production system." Well, they left out tcp_ip_abort_cinterval. And they don't mention tcp_ip_abort_linterval at all which so far seems to be an undocumented Sun Microsystems parameter. A book about tuning should cover all the tunable parameters and explain cause/effect. Simply stating that you never change the other parameters without explaining why isn't why you buy a book on Performance and Tuning. If you're just starting out with Sun administration and do not know a lot of the unix commands to administer and monitor a Solaris box this book will help. The book does cover much of the basics and background that someone starting out needs. The book does leave out a number of higher level concepts and doesn't cover all tunable parameters so it doesn't really help much beyond already available text/webpages which you'll still have to research and scour to really learn the whole story on Solaris performance and tuning. But if you already know some of what you're doing you're money is better kept in your pocket.
Rating: 
Summary: The first 4 pages saved my skin
Review: As a sys admin I was thrown into a situation where Sun and Solaris were getting a bad rap due to (perceived) bad performance. This book gave me the knowledge I needed to fix what I could AND put the onus back on the application where it belonged. The detailed descriptions of SPARC & ULTRA architecture (complete with diagrams) is invaluable and I refer to them all the time. Buy it for the first 4 pages alone!
Rating:
Summary: The first 4 pages saved my skin
Review: As a sys admin I was thrown into a situation where Sun and Solaris were getting a bad rap due to (perceived) bad performance. This book gave me the knowledge I needed to fix what I could AND put the onus back on the application where it belonged. The detailed descriptions of SPARC & ULTRA architecture (complete with diagrams) is invaluable and I refer to them all the time. Buy it for the first 4 pages alone!
Rating: 
Summary: A Must read book by SUN Administrators
Review: I read this book. I feel that it is a must read guide for all Senior System Administrator. It is one of a very few books available covering so deep about Performance Tuning. One of the best book on SUN.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Reading, Didn't cover quite enough.
Review: I've read, re-read, and marked multiple pages of the book, and used it as a guide to monitor multiple systems. This is the best Solaris performance monitoring documention I've seen to dated. The specific utilities covered (vmstat, sar, iostat), give very useful clues about what to look for on systems. Coverage of some system utilties including sar, mpstat, and netstat were limited, and left me looking for missing chapters. Network I/O statistics and items to monitor were poorly covered, in favor of html java, and internet specific applications.
Rating:
Summary: Indispensible
Review: The first 5 pages alone helped me to tune my systems, setup cachefs, etc. Definitely worth the money if you are responsible for the care and feeding of Solaris boxes.
Rating:
Summary: Best book on SUN Performance...so far
Review: There is no question that if you are involved in performance related issues on the SUN Sparc platform, you have to buy this book. It gives you invaluable information and helps you determine what is actually happening on a given system. Having said that, I wish it was better written and organized. This book is intended, I feel, for the intermediate to advanced systems administrator.
Rating: 
Summary: While it's still a nice introduction, it has become dated
Review: This 2nd edition of Cockroft's classic on Sun Performance Tuning was a step up from the somewhat meager meal served in its 1st edition. At the time of its writing this book filled a void, since there was not much "out there" covering performance tuning in general as well as for Sun boxes in particular. Mike Loukides' "System Performance Tuning" still hung around in its 1st edition, and thus had established itself somewhat as the grand-daddy of UNIX performance tuning books, but was already pretty outdated. It's 2nd edition was still years away. While Adrian Cockroft's "Sun Performance and Tuning" today still provides some interesting insights, and therefore could be a welcome addition to a Sun system administrator's bookshelf, there's another book which should be considered first: "Resource Management" from the Sun BluePrints series, which he wrote in collaboration with Richard Mc Dougall, and various others.
Rating:
Summary: A Must read book by SUN Administrators
Review: This book rocks. It gives you a very detailed view of different pieces of the system, and even goes on to debunk some of the more outrageous comptetitors claims. Lots of tunig tricks and explanations of why they will or won't work. I'm an experienced Solaris admin (~3 years) and I still got a lot of new info.
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