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SarCheck is a UNIX performance analysis and tuning tool for most AIX, Sun Solaris, HP-UX, and Linux systems that produces recommendations and explanations, with 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, and here are some pages which may be of interest:
See what SarCheck does, then try it on your own system:
More information:
If you've had trouble understanding how to tune your AIX system using minperm, maxfree, maxclient, or any of the other tunable kernel parameters in ioo, schedo, or vmo, you need SarCheck! SarCheck analyzes your AIX system or LPAR for possible performance bottlenecks and tells you how to correct them. Most performance tools such as HP's Glance are actually resource monitors. They're good tools which provide useful statistics about the utilization various system resources in a variety of numeric and graphical formats but aside from providing some basic monitoring, they leave most of the analysis and interpretation up to you. SarCheck was first released for SCO UNIX in February 1995 and we have been improving it continuously since then and porting it to other more popular flavors of UNIX.
There are a number of interesting things that we're looking at. For example, we compare the percentage of pinned pages to maxpin and graph it if your system has gnuplot and a browser. We look at the different tunable parameters used by JFS and JFS2 filesystems. We look at the rate of paging to the paging spaces together with the usage of that paging (or swap) space. We also use the new sar -u metrics of physc and %entc when they're present. And much more. If you're running AIX 5.3 on a POWER5 system and you're not sure what these are, SarCheck will help explain them to you.
We have tuning algorithms based on the latest information from IBM. If you don't know how to use the lru_file_repage and lru_poll_interval parameters and how to set maxclient and maxperm when you use them, you owe it to yourself to see what SarCheck recommends for your system.
SarCheck takes performance tuning beyond the others. Instead of just re-reporting system data and statistics, SarCheck analyzes the output of the sar utility, and examines the system's tunable parameters and their interaction with each other. Then in a concise, plain English report, SarCheck identifies problem areas and makes recommendations about how to correct them. SarCheck does not actually monitor your system's resources like CPUs, disks, memory, and the values of tunable parameters. It leaves that up to sar, ps, vmo, ioo, schedo, and lsattr, which are included with the operating system. SarCheck has been translating this data into plain English since its first beta versions in 1994. Eventually some other tools may try to generate English output and if they do, we will remain years ahead of them. SarCheck has been widely accepted by companies that have bought thousands of licenses all over the world.
To maintain peak efficiency, use SarCheck regularly and watch how its recommendations change when you add more users, upgrade the processor or add processors, increase memory, add software, or whenever you detect a change in system performance.
SarCheck has been written to be lean and efficient, much like this web site. There isn't a lot of "fluff" here or endless flashy graphics... just the information you need to do your job quickly and efficiently, presented in a user-friendly format. SarCheck requires less than a megabyte of disk space and typically uses less than one second of CPU time per day!
NEW (12/20/07): Beta copies of SarCheck Version 7 for AIX have started shipping. Lots more is coming soon.
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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