Warren, If it helps you find it, that BSTJ has a yellow cover, and the words "The UNIX System" in Star Wars-esque font. (It _was_ 1984, after all.) Much of the state-of-the-art hasn't been too widely disseminated. The know-how lives/lived in a handful of companies -- notably SGI, Sequent, and Sun. Unfortunately, we (the industry) haven't done a good job discussing our experiences -- and as a result there's a huge amount of misunderstanding out there. (Usually in the form of fear-and-loathing about the cost of synchronization primitives or complete ignorance about the software ramifications of snoopy protocols.) The best book out there is definitely Curt Schimmel's "UNIX Systems for Modern Architectures." One could almost certainly write a second volume to this (and a third, and a fourth), but the audience is very, very small. In terms of papers outlining somewhat more recent techniques, check out Bonwick and Adams, "Magazines and Vmem: Extending the Slab Allocator to Many CPUs and Arbitrary Resources." This was presented at USENIX in 2001; see http://www.parrotcode.org/talks/vmem.pdf. Unfortunately, we (the industry) never wrote a paper on the tools we use to improve the scalability of UNIX. SGI and Sun both have "lockstat" tools; you can google each. (Sun's lockstat shipped in Solaris 2.6; if you have a Solaris box, you can man lockstat.) Presumably other vendors have tools as well; to the best of my knowledge none of us ever described them in a refereed paper. And should you be interested in an arcane postmortem technique that I developed to find false-sharing, see Cantrill, "Postmortem Object Type Identification." I presented this at AADEBUG 2003; it can be found at http://arxiv.org/pdf/cs.SE/0309037. It will be interesting to hear about what else you find... - Bryan ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bryan Cantrill, Solaris Kernel Development. bmc(a)eng.sun.com (650) 786-3652