Realtime Graphical Display of System Measurements

Abstract

An operating system performs its job poorly when a subset of its resources, such as CPU, memory, or I/O devices, is heavily loaded. When the number and or capacity of the resources cannot keep up with the demand, some user applications are forced to wait, resulting in a longer average turnaround time and a generally slower system. It is the job of a system manager or administrator to keep the overall system running efficiently by tuning and optimizing the performance of the system. System administrators use system performance commands or software tools to find out how a system is behaving at any given time. For example, performance monitoring and display tools can be used to determine why the CPU utilization is low or whether thrashing exists in the system and as a consequence the system is spending more time doing paging than performing computations. This thesis reports on the design and implementation of a real-time system performance software tool on a Sequent Symmetry S/8l. This tool uses a Graphical User Interface (GUI) that can display various system parameters to help determine what to do to improve system performance. The tool provides a dynamic graphical interface for existing textual performance capture reporting tools.