Linux: Strengths and Weakness

If you use Linux, maintain it, and develop on it, you are in a strange but good situation. You have unprecedented access to source code, developers, and mailing lists, which often document design decisions years after they are made. Linux is an excellent environment in which to find and fix performance problems. This contrasts a proprietary environment, where it can be difficult to get direct access to software developers, may be hard to find written discussions about most design decisions, and is nearly impossible to access source code. In addition to this productive environment, Linux also has powerful performance tools that enable you to find and fix performance problems. These tools rival their proprietary counterparts.

Even with these impressive benefits, the Linux ecosystem still has challenges to overcome. Linux performance tools are scattered everywhere. Different groups with different aims develop the tools, and as a result, the tools are not necessarily in a centralized location. Some tools are included in standard Linux distributions, such as Red Hat, SUSE, and Debian; others are scattered throughout the Internet. If you're trying to solve a performance problem, you first have to know that the tools you need exist, and then figure out where to find them. Because no single Linux performance tool solves every type of performance problem, you also must figure out how to use them jointly to determine what is broken. This can be a bit of an art, but becomes easier with experience. Although most of the general strategies can be documented, Linux does not have any guide that tells you how to aggregate performance tools to actually solve a problem. Most of the tools or subsystems have information about tuning the particular subsystem, but not how to use them with other tools. Many performance problems span several areas of the system, and unless you know how to use the tools collectively, you will not be able the fix the problem.