Linux Performance Tuning

This course is designed to give you all the tools and techniques you need to keep your Linux systems running at optimal levels. These techniques and tools have been developed and tested in the most demanding high-performance computing environments.

Keeping your Linux systems running optimally is a mission-critical function for most Linux IT professionals. This course will teach you the appropriate tools, subsystems, and techniques you need to get the best possible performance out of Linux.

In this course, you’ll learn:

• Industry configuration best practices
• The best tried-and-true optimization performance tuning tools and techniques
• How to manually optimize the kernel’s behavior
• Tracing, profiling and instrumentation techniques across a wide range of conditions
• And more.

This course is designed to work with a wide range of Linux distributions, so you will be able to apply these concepts regardless of your distro.

Audience: This course is primarily intended for system administrators and technology architects who need to select and tune their environment to maximize speed and efficiency. Students should be experienced Linux users. Familiarity with local system administration concepts covered in Linux System Administration is required.

Course Materials: As part of your registration, a printed copy of the course manual will be course manual will be provided. It will be mailed to you the week prior to the class. Please contact us at [email protected] if you haven't received it 2 business days prior to the start of class.

Course Outline:

• Introduction
• Linux Foundation
• Linux Foundation Training
• Logistics
• Performance Optimization Principles
• Methodology
• Optimization Process
• Investigation Tools
• Benchmarking
• Performance Benchmarks
• Synthetic Benchmarks
• Application Benchmarks
• Tuning Interfaces
• Kernel Tunables
• Kernel Parameters
• Application Interfaces
• tuned
• Hardware Tunables
• Monitoring Interfaces
• /proc Filesystem
• Command-line Utilities
• Performance Data Collection
• Nagios
• Ganglia
• Kernel Monitoring
• Profiling Techniques and Tools
• Performance Monitoring
• Counters
• Performance Ratios
• Kernel vs Application Profiling
• oprofile
• Perf
• Available perf events
• Acquiring Performance Data with perf
• Monitoring Performance from Within the Application
• User Space Performance Monitoring with gprof
• Tracing Tools
• User Space Tracing
• strace
• Library Tracing
• Kernel Tracing
• ftrace
• Systemtap
• Tracing Applications with SystemTap
• CPU Subsystem
• CPU Concepts and Architecture
• CPU-Level Optimizations
• Specialized Instruction Sets
• CPU Topologies
• BIOS Settings
• Power Management
• Device Power Management
• CPU Power Saving States
• Frequency Scaling
• Power Management Tools
• Process Scheduling
• Design
• Scheduling Policies
• Scheduling Tunable Settings
• CPU Affinity and Isolation
• Interrupt Affinity
• Memory Subsystem
• Overview
• Page Lookup Optimization and Huge Pages
• Controlling Swapping from Applications
• Minimizing Faults
• NUMA Optimizations
• Key NUMA Concepts
• CPU Concepts and Architecture
• NUMA Memory Allocation
• NUMA Statistics
• I/O Subsystem
• Storage Stack Overview
• I/O Scheduler Concepts
• I/O Scheduler Algorithms
• Hardware Considerations
• Tuning Storage Devices
• Local Filesystems
• Choosing the Right Filesystem
• Ext3/4 Journaling Modes
• Filesystem Attributes
• Network Filesystems
• Network File System (NFS)
• NFSv4
• pNFS
• Storage and IO
• Software RAID Refresher
• RAID Levels
• RAID configuration
• Logical volumes
• Volumes and Volume Groups
• Creating Logical Volumes
• Raw Devices
• Asynchronous I/O
• Analyzing the I/O Subsystem
• iostats
• iotop
• blktrace
• blkparse
• btrace
• btt
• blkiomon
• Network Subsystem Optimization
• Network Stack Overview
• Optimizing for Latency and Throughput
• Network Interface Hardware Settings
• Offloading Techniques
• TCP Optimization
• Monitoring and Diagnostic Tools
• Virtualization
• Virtualization Overview
• Disk Considerations
• Network Consideratons
• Conclusion