He also offers advice on provisioning new systems, which means he offers advice in determining how the computing power sufficient for a new system that will be implemented. Emphasizing the Solaris 8 and, to a lesser extent, Linux, new version of this book is a significant revision (the first came out in 1990 and quite severely outdated). There is coverage of the progress of hardware - multiple processors, RAID storage, the memory is faster and cheaper, and network devices - as well as considering changes in the demands placed on machines (after all, some people worry about the performance of Web servers in 1990) Wall. David - Topics covered: How to get the highest performance from your computer system (which runs Linux and especially Sun Solaris 8) without increasing the capacity of the processor, memory, and other resources at potentially great cost. The authors describe the ways in which the operating system and applications use processors, memory, persistent storage, and networks, and shows the potential barriers.