Introduction; Performance Advisors; Expert System Advisors - IBM Power7 Optimization And Tuning Manual

Introduction

This appendix includes a general description about performance advisors, and descriptions
specific to the three performance advisors that are referenced in this book:
AIX
Linux
Java (either AIX or Linux)

Performance advisors

IBM developed four new performance advisors that empower users to address their own
performance issues to best use their Power Systems server. These performance advisors can
be run by a broad class of users.
The first three of these advisors are tools that run and analyze the configuration of a system
and the software that is running on it. They also provide advice about the performance
implications of the current configuration and suggestions for improvement. These three
advisors are documented in "Expert system advisors" on page 156.
The fourth advisor is part of the IBM Rational Developer for Power Systems Software. It is a
component of an integrated development environment (IDE), which provides a set of features
for performance tuning of C and C++ applications on AIX and Linux. That advisor is
documented in "Rational Performance Advisor" on page 161.

Expert system advisors

The expert system advisors are three new tools that are developed by IBM. What is unique
about these applications is that they collect and interpret performance data. In one step, they
collect performance metrics, analyze data, and provide a one-page visual report. This report
summarizes the performance health of the environment, and includes instructions for
alleviating detected problems. The performance advisors produce advice that is based on the
expertise of IBM performance analysts, and IBM documented preferred practices. These
expert systems focus on AIX Partition Virtualization, VIOS, and Java performance.
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