RH442 Red Hat Enterprise System Monitoring and Performance Tuning

Course Outline

1. Basics: Principles and Terminology
   • What is performance tuning?
   • Steps in the tuning process
   • Quantifying performance
2. Tools for Obtaining Information
   • The sysfs and proc filesystems and the sysctl utility
   • System process queues
   • The system activity reporter
   • Passing parameters to kernel modules
   • Generating reports using standard utilties
   • Benchmarking
   • Monitoring systems with SNMP and MRTG
3. Monitoring the Kernel
   • Kernel profiling and OProfile
   • Monitoring the kernel with SystemTap
4. Hardware Performance Considerations
   • Memory: levels, types
   • Cache
   • Disk and I/O
5. The CPU: Processes and Scheduling
   • Controlling processor speed
   • How the Linux kernel schedules processes
   • Process priority
   • Obtaining processor performance information
6. Memory
   • How Processes and the kernel utilize memory
   • System tunables that affect memory performance
   • How page and buffer caches work
   • Monitoring and controlling memory usage
   • The virtual memory subsystem
7. The I/O Subsystem and Filesystems
   • Tuning the disk I/O subsystem
   • I/O scheduling
   • The virtual file system
   • File system tunable parameters
   • Layout of the ext2 and ext3 filesystems
   • Journaling
8. Network Performance
   • Factors affecting performance
   • Viewing device information
   • Ethernet channel bonding
   • Network sockets
   • Layers of the OSI model
   • TCP tuning
9. Application Tuning
   • Causes of performance problems
   • Application tuning
   • Viewing application behaviors using standard tools
   • NFS
   • Apache
   • Samba