It is a characteristic of most computer systems that they do not degrade gradually; performance is acceptable day after day, until quite suddenly it all falls apart. When this happens, the administrator needs to be prepared to help the organization get through the crisis. Computer applications are growing ever more intelligent and easy to use. One of the by-products of making applications easier to use is that they usually also require more resources to run. Wherever productivity is a central factor in the decisions made, performance considerations loom large and continue to play an important role in system management. This book shows why it is important to understand the performance characteristics of the hardware and of the workload, and how they match up against each other. It takes the reader through problem-solving techniques like measurement methodology, workload characterization, bench-marking, decomposition techniques and analytic queuing models. Among the subjects the book covers are: processor performance; application profiling and hardware considerations; multi-processing; memory and paging; file cache; disk performance; IIS; and networking.