UNIX Performance Tuning Simplified... and Linux Performance Tuning too!

SarCheck is a Linux & UNIX performance analysis and performance tuning tool. It is designed to help you with performance management on most Solaris, Linux, AIX, and HP-UX systems by making recommendations and explaining them with Plain English text, supporting graphs, and tables. You can order a FREE evaluation copy right here. More information about SarCheck can be found further down on this page or on our high-bandwidth narrated product tour.

We'll be testing pieces of the new SarCheck website soon, watch for the new look!

About SarCheck

SarCheck is a tool developed and sold by Aptitune Corporation that helps system administrators with Linux and UNIX performance tuning. It does this by analyzing the output of sar, the /proc filesystem, ps, other tools, and reading more information from the kernel. It identifies problem areas and if necessary, recommends changes to the system's tunable kernel parameters and hardware resources like CPUs, disks, and memory. SarCheck translates your system's resource utilization data into a Plain English report and will insert HTML tags into the text if you want to view the output through a browser. SarCheck has been producing English output since its introduction in 1994 and is a mature, stable product that continues to be enhanced based on feedback from thousands of users. If you're used to looking at nothing more than vmstat, sar, and uptime output, you're going to be amazed. If you're used to looking at one of the many "drill-down graph generator" tools, you'll love the fact that SarCheck gives real answers. Aptitune Corporation has offices in both the U.S. and the U.K.

SarCheck can detect CPU Bottlenecks, runaway processes, I/O bottlenecks, improper I/O load balancing, slow disk devices, memory bottlenecks and leaks, inefficient system buffer cache sizing, improper system table sizes, inefficient PATH variables, and other problems with the way Linux and UNIX kernel parameters are set. The resource analysis and recommendations sections of SarCheck will analyze the data and make recommendations for gradual changes to your system. The capacity planning component of SarCheck will approximate the amount of capacity left on your system and determine which resource is likely to become exhausted first. SarCheck is available to help you with performance tuning of Solaris SPARC 2.5+, HP-UX 10.10+, AIX 4.2+, and Linux kernels 2.2 to 2.6. Check the appropriate FAQ or contact us if you have any questions.

The philosophy behind our development of SarCheck can be seen at this web site. Note the lack of huge garish graphics, the high ratio of content to "fluff", and the frequent software updates. SarCheck gives you real information so that you can make real decisions about how to improve UNIX and Linux performance. This is not one of those tools which produce graphs that you have to interpret for yourself, and it certainly won't encourage you to press a button to automatically change 60 things at once.

SarCheck trivia: SarCheck has been licensed and installed by Universities, Government agencies, and lots of companies around the world. The northernmost licensee is located in Bodø, Norway and the site of the southernmost licensee is Wellington, New Zealand. The licensees located farthest from our office in the northeast corner of the U.S. are in Perth and Bentley, Australia. It looks like the Bentley location is 1 or 2 km farther away, but we don't know the location of either site with enough precision to be sure. The SarCheck user at the lowest altitude is -5 meters below sea level in Amstelveen, The Netherlands. We're not sure which user is located at the highest altitude but they're probably located in the Alps or the Rockies. Finally, the youngest user looks like this. :-)

Requirements:
(SarCheck resource utilization is trivial. If your system can't spare the resources needed to run SarCheck, it has big problems)

• SarCheck only requires about a megabyte of disk space. Report files containing sar and ps data will take up additional space, and you control how much of this data you want to keep.
• SarCheck typically uses about a second of CPU time per day. Actual CPU utilization will depend on the configuration of the system being analyzed and the information requested using SarCheck's numerous switches. If SarCheck uses gnuplot to create graphs, gnuplot will use some extra time too.
• SarCheck typically requires only a few megabytes of memory for the brief time that it's running. This varies based on operating system, the problems detected by SarCheck when it's running, and the switches used. As an example of how little memory is needed by SarCheck is that it always ran well on 4 megabyte SCO UNIX 3.2v4.2 systems!

Quotes from some recent email:

• I am very pleased with SarCheck, and I feel that it has already paid for itself within days of installation on both machines. It is commonplace to hear outrageous claims of performance tuning in the computer industry. However, something quite uncommon is a product that actually delivers on those promises. I can safely say that SarCheck is one of those rare gems that actually delivers on everything that it claims.
• I have found your software easy to install, and produces good information quickly from what can be a huge mass of data. My earlier analysis of an RS6000 system here (which had taken a week) was confirmed in minutes by the use of Sarcheck and gave me some additional pointers to improving the performance.
• I'm Impressed... it suggested changing three parameters. I changed the three parameters and the result was at least a 100% increase in performance when running a large database update. Thank you for providing such a useful tuning tool.

Disclaimer: SarCheck is not available in countries or jurisdictions where our products or license agreements violate local law. We are unaware of any locations where this would apply, but laws and customs vary wildly around the world. Please contact us if you have any questions.

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Parts of this site were last updated/tweaked on May 13, 2008