Top ten AIX and UNIX articles and tutorials—November 2007

See what AIX® and UNIX® content your peers found most valuable.

Browse through these popular articles and tutorials for the month of November:

1. nmon performance: A free tool to analyze AIX and Linux performance

   This free tool gives you a huge amount of information all on one screen. Even though IBM doesn't officially support the tool and you must use it at your own risk, you can get a wealth of performance statistics. Why use five or six tools when one free tool can give you everything you need?

2. AIX commands you should not leave home without

   Do you ever feel you wish you could answer some of your own questions when you work with AIX and your System p server? Do you ever feel you could save time by not having to call on the support professionals all the time? Well, wish no more. Shiv Dutta discusses some of the AIX commands that answer those questions and tells you how to enlarge the list of such answers.

3. Windows to UNIX porting, Part 2: Internals of porting C/C++ sources

   Part 1 of this series covered the typical C/C++ project types you work with in a Microsoft Visual Studio environment and introduced the processes of porting dynamic and static library project variants to a UNIX platform. Part 2 delves into some of the compiler options used to build Visual C++ projects and the UNIX and g++ equivalents, takes a closer look at the g++ attribute mechanism as it relates to porting, and examines some common problems you might encounter while porting from a 32-bit Windows environment to a 64-bit UNIX environment. It concludes with an overview of concepts for porting multithreaded applications and an example project that shows you how to pull all these pieces together.

4. UNIX tips: Learn 10 good UNIX usage habits

   Adopt 10 good habits that improve your UNIX command line efficiency—and break away from bad usage patterns in the process. This article takes you step-by-step through several good, but too often neglected, techniques for command-line operations. Learn about common errors and how to overcome them, so you can learn exactly why these UNIX habits are worth picking up.

5. Advanced techniques for using the UNIX find command

   Explore the vast terrain of the UNIX file system with the find command. One of the most powerful and useful commands in the UNIX programmer's repertoire is find. All flavors of UNIX have file systems that can contain thousands of files of many different types. With so many choices, locating a specific file, or set of files, can be difficult. The find command makes this task easier in many ways.

6. nmon analyser—A free tool to produce AIX performance reports

   Searching for an easy way to create high-quality graphs that you can print, publish to the Web, or cut and paste into performance reports? Look no further. The nmon_analyser tool takes files produced by the NMON performance tool, turns them into Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, and automatically produces these graphs.

7. Optimizing AIX 5L performance: Tuning disk performance, Part 3

   Part 3 of this series covers how to improve overall file system performance, how to tune your systems with the ioo command, and how to use the filemon and fileplace utilities.

8. Systems Administration Toolkit: Monitor user usage

   Explore new ways to record UNIX logins and other system activities in a number of different logs, and take advantage of this information to monitor user usage. This can be helpful from a number of perspectives, either to use for chargeback reporting or just to get an idea of how busy and active individual users are on the system to help when planning and allocating resources.

9. Optimizing AIX 5L performance: Tuning your memory settings, Part 1

   This three-part series on memory tuning dives right into tuning parameters, focusing on the many challenges and the various best practices of optimizing memory performance, and it also discusses some improvements in AIX Version 5.3. While memory tuning might be more difficult to implement than Central Processing Unit (CPU) tuning, it certainly is no less important. You can do more to tune memory on an AIX server than on any other subsystem. Changing some memory parameters on your system can increase performance dramatically, particularly when these parameters are not optimized for the environment which you are running. Part 1 of this series provides an overview of memory on AIX, including a discussion of virtual memory and the Virtual Memory Manager (VMM).

10. Writing endian-independent code in C

    Architectures, processors, network stacks, and communication protocols all have to define endianness at some point. This article explains how endianness affects code, how to determine endianness at run time, and how to write code that can reverse byte order and free you from being bound to a certain endian.

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