Unix® System Management Primer Plus

Gauging Network Performance and Capacity

Fine-tuning CPU usage, memory, swap, and disk performance will do you no good if your servers cannot be reached over the network. System administrators often take connectivity and bandwidth for granted, assuming one machine will be able to talk to another in a timely fashion.

System administrators must plan network capacity and optimize network performance, just as they do any other system resource. But the network offers special challenges, because it is a shared medium used by all of the systems connected to it. To optimize network performance, system administrators must learn to gauge specific performance metrics and understand what factors can affect them.

Bandwidth Versus Latency

Network performance ...