Web Performance Tuning

Unix

Any Unix workstation can run a web client, but it is probably overkill to dedicate workstation hardware to web browsing when Macintosh or PC hardware will do just fine. Linux is the most popular version of Unix^[3] for commodity PC hardware, partly because it is free along with all of the source code. Given identical PC hardware, you can get much better performance from Linux than from Windows, but until recently there has been little commercial software available for Linux because of its origins in the hobby world. Linux does have sufficient software to be a good web client because there is Netscape for Linux and a good Java Virtual Machine as well as all the usual Unix tools that make it relatively easy to figure out exactly what’s going on in the system and the network: top, vmstat, strace, traceroute, ping, etc. Linux is a boon for anyone interested in operating systems. Here are a few of the things you can do to figure out exactly what is going on in your Linux web client:

• Start top and use M to sort all processes by memory usage. Leave it running. You’ll probably see that Netscape is your single largest process and that it keeps growing as you use more of its features.

• Leave netstat -c running and you can see Netscape open connections as you retrieve web pages. Connections are open when netstat says they are in the ESTABLISHED state. The connections should all eventually be closed, except perhaps for connections such as the one to your POP mail server that polls for new ...