PDP 11/70 front panel (similar to the 11/45)

Out of curiosity, I’ve developed a USE Method-based performance checklist for Unix 7th Edition on a PDP-11/45, which I’ve been running via a PDP simulator. 7th Edition is from 1979, and was the first Unix with iostat(1M) and pstat(1M), enabling more serious performance analysis from shipped tools. Were I to write a checklist for earlier Unixes, it would contain many more “unknowns”.

I often work on the illumos kernel, a direct descendant of Unix …

In this post, I’ll provide an example USE Method-based performance checklist for FreeBSD, for identifying common bottlenecks and errors. This is intended to be used early in a performance investigation, before moving onto more time consuming methodologies. This should be helpful for anyone using FreeBSD, especially system administrators.

This was developed on FreeBSD 10.0 alpha, and focuses on tools shipped by default. With DTrace, I was able to create a few new one-liners to answer some metrics. See the notes below the tables.

Physical Resources