This book arose out of an attempt to meet two key objectives. The first was
to communicate the theory and practice of performance analysis to those who
need it most, viz. IT professionals, system administrators, software developers,
and performance test engineers. Many of the currently available books on
computer performance analysis fall into one of three distinct camps:
1. Books that discuss tuning the performance of a particular platform, e.g.,
Linux, Solaris, Windows. These books explain how you can turn individual
software “knobs” with the hope that this will tune your platform.
2. Books that emphasize formal queueing theory under the rubric of perfor￾mance modeling. These books are written by mathematicians for mathe￾maticians and therefore are burdened with too much Greek for the average
IT professional to suffer through.
3. Books that employ queueing theory without the Greek but the perfor￾mance models are unrealistic because they are essentially academic toys