What About Commercial Applications?

What About Commercial Applications?

You cannot usually tune commercially available applications to any great degree. If your monitoring has told you that a commercially purchased application is causing your system to run at unacceptably slow levels, you have a few options:

You can look for other areas to reduce system overhead and increase speed, such as reducing the system load in other areas to compensate for your application. Options such as batch processing of files and programs when system load levels permit often show a noticeable increase in performance. See "Automating Tasks with at(1), batch(1), and cron(1M)".
You can use the nice(1), renice(1), npri(1) and runon(1) utilities to change the priority of other processes to give your application a greater share of CPU time. See "Prioritizing Processes With nice" and "Changing the Priority of a Running Process".
You can undertake a general program of system performance enhancement, which can include maximizing operating system i/o through disk striping and increased swap space. See the IRIX Admin: Disks and Filesystems guide.
You can add additional memory, disk space, or even upgrade to a faster CPU.
You can find another application that performs the same function but that is less intensive on your system. (This is the least preferable option, of course.)