[plug] IBM draft Redpaper: Linux Performance and Tuning Guidelines

[Fred Janon]

IBM has just published the draft of a Redpaper "Linux Performance and
Tuning Guidelines". It's a 2.9MB pdf document you can find at:

<http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpieces/abstracts/redp4285.html>

Description:

Over the past few years, Linux has made its way into the data centers
of many corporations all over the globe. The Linux operating system has
become accepted by both the scientific and enterprise user population.
Today, Linux is by far the most versatile operating system. You can
find Linux on embedded devices such as firewalls and cell phones and
mainframes. Naturally, performance of the Linux operating system has
become a hot topic for both scientific and enterprise users. However,
calculating a global weather forecast and hosting a database impose
different requirements on the operating system. Linux has to
accommodate all possible usage scenarios with the most optimal
performance. The consequence of this challenge is that most Linux
distributions contain general tuning parameters to accommodate all
users.

IBM® has embraced Linux, and it is recognized as an operating system
suitable for enterprise-level applications running on IBM systems. Most
enterprise applications are now available on Linux, including file and
print servers, database servers, Web servers, and collaboration and
mail servers.

With use of Linux in an enterprise-class server comes the need to
monitor performance and, when necessary, tune the server to remove
bottlenecks that affect users. This IBM Redpaper describes the methods
you can use to tune Linux, tools that you can use to monitor and
analyze server performance, and key tuning parameters for specific
server applications. The purpose of this redpaper is to understand,
analyze, and tune the Linux operating system to yield superior
performance for any type of application you plan to run on these
systems. 
 
Table of Contents 
Chapter 1, Understanding the Linux operating system
Chapter 2. Monitoring and benchmark tools
Chapter 3. analyzing performance bottlenecks
Chapter 4. Tuning the operating system
 
Enjoy,

Fred