Part IV Resource management #

Tuning the system is not only about optimizing the kernel or getting the most out of your application, it begins with setting up a lean and fast system. The way you set up your partitions and file systems can influence the server's speed. The number of active services and the way routine tasks are scheduled also affects performance.

Kernel Control Groups (“cgroups”) are a kernel feature for assigning and limiting hardware and system resources for processes. Processes can also be organized in a hierarchical tree structure.

There are physical limitations to hardware that are encountered when many CPUs and lots of memory are required. In this chapter, the important limitation is that there is limited communication bandwidth between the CPUs and the memory. One architecture modification that was introduced to address this is Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA).

In this configuration, there are multiple nodes. Each of the nodes contains a subset of all CPUs and memory. The access speed to main memory is determined by the location of the memory relative to the CPU. The performance of a workload depends on the application threads accessing data that is local to the CPU the thread is executing on. Automatic NUMA Balancing migrates data on demand to memory nodes that are local to the CPU accessing that data. Depending on the workload, this can dramatically boost performance when using NUMA hardware.

Power management aims at reducing operating costs for energy and cooling systems while at the same time keeping the performance of a system at a level that matches the current requirements. Thus, power management is always a matter of balancing the actual performance needs and power saving options for a system. Power management can be implemented and used at different levels of the system. A set of specifications for power management functions of devices and the operating system interface to them has been defined in the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI). As power savings in server environments can primarily be achieved at the processor level, this chapter introduces some main concepts and highlights some tools for analyzing and influencing relevant parameters.

TuneD is a daemon for Linux systems that monitors CPU and disk usage and adjusts specific settings to optimize system performance under certain workloads. Other system settings, such as those configured via sysctl, are applied when the service starts, and remain static unless manually reloaded. TuneD offers predefined tuning profiles tailored for common use cases such as servers and virtual machines, as well as the ability to create custom profiles. TuneD leverages several tuning plug-ins that interact with underlying Linux subsystems to tune the CPU, disk I/O, networking, virtual memory, power management, and other components.