Part 1 : Introduction
In a time in the global economy where we need to do more with less resources, getting the most out of your computing environment is paramount. In a different time when computing resources were starting to diminish and degradation set in, the obvious thing to do was to throw more hardware at the environment. This could be painfully expensive. Today, the approach is very different because IT management is looking at performance tuning exercises versus buying hardware to maximize their existing computing resources. In this blog, we will begin by covering the history of UNIX and then dive into each area of the computing resources (CPU, Memory and Storage) and drill down on how performance exercises can be applied to pinpoint areas of your system that may be the bottlenecks involved in your systems poor performance.
History Of UNIX:
In the 1960s at AT&T's Bell Labs research center, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie were working on a "new" Operating System called: Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computer Services). It was a big complex system. It could grow in size by simply adding more resources, such as computing power, main memory, or disk storage. Although it was very complex, some basic concepts were useful, like the concept of a shell, processes, and a hierarchical file system structure. In 1969 Multics project ended, but the developers decided to continue privately. They implemented the good parts from Multics with a different design philosophy, focusing on keeping the system small and simple. Then came the name of Unix (originally Unics) as the opposite of Multics, which was: "overdesigned and overbuilt and over everything. It was close to unusable" said Ken Thompson.
In the 1970s Unix started to be popular in Universities. It was not possible to buy the Unix operating system (as an installation package), which could be run on any computer. If somebody wanted to use it, the source code had to be modified to the actual hardware. With this approach during the years different flavors of Unix systems started to emerge, such as AIX, DG/UX, HP/UX, Solaris and many others.
In my next blogs, I'll cover the three major resources of the computer: CPU, Memory and Disk.