In this paper, the required operating system tuning tasks are grouped into three sections: processor, memory, and I/O tuning. Fine-grained tuning is important and valuable, though this level of tuning can potentially lead to problems if not used correctly. Each of these will be discusses in detail. The reader will come to understand that performance tuning involves trade-offs that might favor one environment, though hurting another. For this reason, the paper also explains the importance of applying tuning changes one at a time, while monitoring the overall system throughput to determine if the alteration is beneficial for the environment.
| Introduction |
| Problem Description the introduction of IBM p5 servers and the Advanced Power Virtualization feature allows processors and I/O devices to be virtualized and shared. Virtualizing I/O adapters, called Virtual I/O or VIO, allows the sharing of these resources by multiple logical partitions. There are cost and consolidation advantages to utilizing this technology. But there are also challenges in creating and managing a virtual environment. |
Tune with ioo, filemon, fileplace, JFS and JFS2
The first and second installments of this series discussed the importance of architecting your systems, the impact it can have on overall system performance, and a new I/O tuning tool, lvmo, which you can use to tune logical volumes. In this installment, you will examine how to tune your systems using the ioo command, which configures the majority of all I/O tuning parameters and displays the current or next boot values for all I/O tuning parameters.
Monitoring logical volumes and analyzing the results
Unlike the tuning of other subsystems, tuning disk I/O should actually be started during the architectural phase of building your systems. While there are virtual memory equivalents of I/O tuning parameters (ioo and lvmo), the best way to increase disk I/O performance is by properly configuring your systems and not tuning parameters. Unlike virtual memory tuning, it is much more complex to change the way you structure your logical volumes after they have been created and are running, so you usually get only one chance to do this right. In this article, we will discuss ways that you can configure your logical volumes and where to actually place them with respect to the physical disk.