Business Areas:                                                                      Performance Tuning   Performance tuning is primarily a matter of resource management and correct system-parameter setting which involves configuring many parts of the system. Simply installing a faster CPU or adding additional random access memory (RAM) may not be the best — or most cost-effective — solution to poor performance. Tuning the workload and the system for efficient resource use consists of the several steps: Identifying the workloads on the system Determining how the results would be measured Quantifying and prioritizing the objectives Identifying the critical resources that limit the system's performance Minimizing the workload's critical-resource requirements Using the most appropriate resource, if there is a choice Reducing the critical-resource requirements of individual programs or system functions Structuring for parallel resource use Modifying the allocation of resources to reflect priorities Changing the priority or resource limits of individual programs Changing the settings of system resource-management parameters Repeating the steps until objectives are met Applying additional resources, if necessary Figure 1, Performance Tuning   Performance is one of the most important aspects when you are working with network and database systems. There are three main areas that affect your system's performance: CPU usage, I/O utilization, and memory usage.   Depending on your system resources, there will always be some trade-offs between CPU, memory, and I/O in your tuning decisions. You will need to balance these three areas to tune for optimal performance.   Understanding the network and database workloads is also critical for effectively configuring your network and database for optimal performance. There are three types of network and database workloads: Online Transaction Processing (OLTP), consisting of many transactions of varying complexity, mostly small. OLTP transactions include selects, inserts, updates, and deletes, which normally complete in seconds or sub-seconds Decision Support Systems (DSS), usually select-only transactions with large queries accessing a considerable amount of data A mix of the two above General tuning tips are the same regardless of the network and database workload, but differences do exist between OLTP and DSS workloads. Many factors can affect the performance of a database server, such as hardware system design, database object design, data storage management, application design, and so forth. We address the monitoring and tuning tips in these environments. We help you tune your system, configure your hardware and network according to established guidelines and recommendations.