Saltzer, J.H. and Gintell, J.W., "The Instrumentation of Multics," Communications of the ACM, Vol. 13, No. 8, August 1970, pp. 495-500.  Home/Search   Document Not in Database   Summary   Related Articles   Check

....is going wrong. Saltzer reminds designers that measurement is more trustworthy than intuition and can reveal problems that users have not yet detected. He encourages designers to focus on understanding the inner workings of the system, rather than relying on the response to changes in workload [13]. Lucas conveys a similar message encouraging system designers to regularly run benchmarks and build in as much instrumentation as possible [11] While many systems of the 70 s heeded these words of wisdom and built in significant performance evaluation tools [8] today s systems show a surprising ....

Saltzer, J.H. and Gintell, J.W., "The Instrumentation of Multics," Communications of the ACM, Vol. 13, No. 8, August 1970, pp. 495-500.

....requires an analysis of vast amounts of statistics and data. In order to accomplish this effectively, a rigorous experimental procedure is required. Rather than instrument separate benchmark programs, the system itself can be instrumented and continuously monitored. The Multics operating system [Saltzer70] was an early example of a system that was designed from the ground up for continuous monitoring and profiling, with the goal of regular analysis of the data and feedback into the design and tuning of the system. We are not suggesting a radical change in systems research. Our work here can be ....

Saltzer, J., Gintell, J., "The Instrumentation of Multics," Communications of the ACM, 13, 8, pp. 495--500, August 1970.

....or developing specific dynamic modules such as a scheduler that may adapt its behavior depending on application requirements. Section 2.2 discusses extensible operating systems as VINO is an example of one. 2. 1 Performance Analysis An early system that monitors system resources is Multics [Sal70]. Originally developed to allow the sharing of services in a controlled manner, it uses a number of measurement techniques to understand system resource utilization. The metering capability records the time spent executing certain supervisor modules. For each module, the metering system records ....

Saltzer, J., The Instrumentation of Multics, Communications of the ACM, Vol 13. No. 8 1970, pp. 495-500.

....and comparability of benchmark results. Each vendor configures the tests differently. Furthermore, there is no simple way to derive a suitable configuration for a particular site. As is often the case, individuals frequently have inaccurate perceptions of the inner workings of their system [7]. WebStone, of course, attempts to define a standard configuration, so the results can be comparable. However, using the standard configuration, WebStone fails to reflect reality in either its file set or its model of user behavior. WebStone measures throughput with only five files on the server; ....

Saltzer, Jerome H., and Gintell, John W. "The Instrumentation of Multics," Communication of the ACM, 13, No. 8, August 1970, pp. 495--500.

....systems. As shown in Figure 1.2, the system administrator monitors the host computer system, analyzes the data he or she has collected, and performs a therapy procedure on the host as needed. In addition to this process being very time consuming, there are several difficulties with this approach [55]: ffl frequently, the best guesses by system administrators are wrong; and ffl performance degradations of up to 20 go unnoticed on a regular basis. In addition, regardless of the problem domain, human expertise suffers from several other limitations: ffl it is not always available (illnesses, ....

Saltzer, J. H., and Gintell, J. W. The instrumentation of MULTICS. Communications of the ACM 13, 8 (1970), 495--500.

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