Sunday, March 1, 2009

Tuning LINUX Toolbox

Finding Bottlenecks

Vmstat
Columns Information
(r,b) - How many process can be run if a CPU is available and how many are blocked.
(swpd, free, buff, cache) - Show how memory space is used.
(si, so) - Page-In and Page-Out
(io, bi, bo) - Number of Blocks received and sent to block devices
(in, cs) - Number of Interupts and context switches
(us, sy, id, wa) - Indicate percentage of time the CPU(s) has spent in userspace applications, in the kernel, being idle....

# vmstat 5 10 (To run vmstat with ten updates, five seconds )



Articles to consider:

  1. Monitoring Virtual Memory with vmstat by LINUX Journal
  2. Understanding the Linux Virtual Memory Manager by Mel Gorman
  3. Is swap space obsolete? by Martin Pool


Disk Performance
Hdparm is a good tool to determine whether the disks are healthy and configured
# hdparm -tT /dev/sda

Article to consider:


  1. Speeding up Linux Using hdparm by O'Reilly

# iostat -x sda 1
(%iowait) - High means CPU is idele and waiting for outstanding disk I/O requests.
(avgqu-sz) - Value should be less than 1
(%util) - pecentage of time the disk has requests.

To install on CentOS, Fedora, "yum install sysstat", iostat will be installed with the packages.

Articles to consider:

  1. Sysstat Utilities Home Page

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