Design and implementation of an event monitor for the unix operating system

Tuning a computer system effectively requires prior studies on the performance of the system. There are different types of tools available to measure a system: hardware, firmware and software. This thesis presents the design and implementation of an event monitor, which is one type of software tools. The event monitor was developed on a SUN1 workstation running UNIX 4.2bsd version 1.4. Six types of events were selected to be measured, namely transactions, logins/logouts, pageins, pageouts, disk I/Os and forks/exits. The operating system was modified to include probes to trap these events. For a final testing of the event monitor, it was ported and installed onto a SUN3 workstation running UNIX 4.2bsd version 3.2. Measurements collected were analyzed by a capacity planning package condenser. The results give an indication of the system workload and the system performance. Benchmarks were also set up to measure the overhead incurred by the event monitor.Science, Faculty ofComputer Science, Department ofGraduat