2.6 kernel tuning guides

[Fraser Campbell]

On Thu, 2005-21-07 at 17:19 -0400, Lennart Sorensen wrote:

> sysfs tuneables are writeable "files" in /sys
> 
> Similar to some adjustable values in /proc

That much I know.  I was hoping to find detailed advice, as examples:

- precisely what is impact of changing /proc/sys/vm/dirty_*,
- aio-max-size, what is it's equivalent in 2.6, is it a fixed size?
- impact of different I/O schedulers according to type of application,
  which scheduler is best where, what tunables are worth playing with?
- impact of different I/O schedulers in UP versus SMP

Pieces of this are documented in kernel source but much of it would be
difficult or impossible to deduce from source reading.  If Google is
having a good day some stuff is even available online.  I had hoped to
short circuit testing by having some good up-front guidelines.

I did find a few books in Chapters (Square One) and early reading is
promising:

- Performance Tuning for Linux Servers (IBM Press)
- Optimizing Linux Performance (HP)

The HP book is focused a lot on monitoring tools (vmstat, iostat,
mpstat, sar, ps, top, cachegrind, etc.) and how to pinpoint application
bottlenecks.  The IBM book gets more into kernel specific tuning
options.  Both books appear to have decent case studies.

-- 
Fraser Campbell <fraser-Txk5XLRqZ6CsTnJN9+BGXg at public.gmane.org>              http://www.wehave.net/
Georgetown, Ontario, Canada                      Debian GNU/Linux

--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml