Just remember, that when writing self contained awk scripts, the command line interpreter line (i.e. the #! line) needs to have -f at the end. Otherwise you will get all sorts of divide by zero errors, and other similarly non-helpful messages.

#!/bin/awk -f

#!/opt/local/bin/gawk -f

Just recently an ex-colleague from Sun asked me to send him some background info on NetApp filer performance. Normally the filer can just be plugged in and it ought to be ready to go without much tweaking. The following documents give some background on how to setup a filer in various environments.

• A list of all technical reports
• Database Performance with NFS: Optimizing Oracle on NFS.
  A little dated, but still an interesting introduction to using NFS in an enterprise environment

• Best Practices for File System Alignment in Virtual Environments. Some specific tips for using a filer with hypervisors
• Evaluating the Performance of FCoE, iSCSI, and FC Using DSS Workloads with Microsoft SQL Server 2008
• If You’re Doing This, Then Your Storage Could Be Underutilized
• Introduction to Predictive Cache Statistics
  DataONTAP contains a facility which enables users to determine how much benefit they might get from installing a flash based accelerator card (FlashCache).

• Performance Study of IBM DB2 9 with NFS, iSCSI, and FCP
  The recommendations in this document are also generally applicable across NFS, iCSCI and FCP.

• NetApp and VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 Storage Best Practices

Courtesy of Cem Kaner you are employed as a performance analyst, then the following probably applies to you too. I consider performance defects as a class of bug, which need to be fixed by some other entity (maybe a programmer, or an architect or sysadmin). This means you’re about to create work for some other person, who might prefer to be watching Star Wars, drinking coffee or spending time with their family.

1. The point of testing is to find bugs.

2. Bug reports are your primary
work product. This is what people outside
of the testing group will most notice and most
remember of your work.

3. The best tester isn’t the one who finds the most bugs or who embarrasses the most programmers. The best tester is the one who gets the most bugs fixed.

4. Programmers operate under time constraints and competing priorities. For example, outside of the 8- hour workday, some programmers prefer sleeping and watching Star Wars to fixing bugs.

A bug report is a tool that you use to sell the
programmer on the idea of spending her time
and energy to fix a bug.

Go here for the full text.. I
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More of an overview than an anything specific. Makes a good point on the provenance of the eventual vizualization ( I have started to include pointers to the R / gnuplot script as a comment in wiki pages, when I include a chart) .

Hadley Wickham at Google (Data analysis with R and ggplot2)