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Low Kian Seong
Asked: 2011-02-03 21:38:23 +0800 CST

How do I calculate the amount of tuning needed for my server?

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I have a server which is running a few discrete Python, Java application which most of the time imports data into a PostGreSQL database. I would like to know from people out there who have experience tuning enterprise grade servers how do i go about calculating in a holistic way the amount of tuning needed for my server for example vm.swappiness, vm.overcommit_ratio and other numerical tunings needed for my server.

I tried to enable sar on my server to capture daily numbers but these are more along the lines of total numbers and I can't figure out how to allocate memory for my applications. Help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

tuning performance-tuning

2 Answers

  1. First, determine the bottleneck in the system(slow PostgreSQL query, slow IO, slowly working scripts). Then use standard monitoring tools(top,htop,iostat,vmstat,pgtop,iotop) to determine a cause. Further, you find a solution(pgtune,kernel parameter,mount option,java vm option,rewrite source code).

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  2. You should install some kind of monitoring tool to get statistics. The best way to analyze the statistics is to get visual graphs of monitored parameters, I think. Cacti or Zabbix will provide you with these graphs. Most probably your system is I/O bound or memory bound, so you should start from monitoring your memory usage, swap file usage, I/O statistics and load average on a host. Cacti has a good set of templates to monitor I/O stats: http://www.markround.com/archives/48-Linux-iostat-monitoring-with-Cacti.html Also, it would be useful to get a list of slow SQL queries, you can do it by setting something like log_min_duration_statement = 200 in postgresql.conf, where 200 is a desired number of milliseconds, you can use any other number as well.

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