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© Copyright IBM Corp. 2007. All rights reserved. 39
Draft Document for Review May 4, 2007 11:35 am 4285ch02.fm
Chapter 2. Monitoring and benchmark tools
The open and flexible nature of the Linux operating system has led to a significant number of
performance monitoring tools. Some of them are Linux versions of well-known UNIX utilities,
and others were specifically designed for Linux. The fundamental support for most Linux
performance monitoring tools lays in the virtual proc file system. To measure performance, we
also have to use appropriate benchmark tools.
In this chapter we outline a selection of Linux performance monitoring tools and discuss
useful commands and we also introduce some of useful benchmark tools. It is up to the
reader to select utilities to achieve the performance monitoring task.
Most of the monitoring tools we discuss ship with Enterprise Linux distributions.
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