WHITEPAPERS

When a production system performance issue is reported resist the temptation to study system wide statistics and extrapolate, particularly if they are historic smoothed averages with no indication of standard deviation (e.g. historic sar data taken by five minute samples in cron). It is usually far more fruitful to identify the thread of execution which is the basis of the complaint (e.g. the report is running slowly, my screen is updating slowly, etc.).