IBM REDP-4285-00 Manual De Usuario

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© Copyright IBM Corp. 2007. All rights reserved.
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Draft Document for Review May 4, 2007 11:35 am
4285pref.fm
Preface
Linux® is an open source operating system developed by people all over the world. The 
source code is freely available and can be used under the GNU General Public License. The 
operating system is made available to users in the form of distributions from companies such 
as Red Hat and Novell. Some desktop Linux distributions can be downloaded at no charge 
from the Web, but the server versions typically must be purchased.
Over the past few years, Linux has made its way into the data centers of many corporations 
all over the globe. The Linux operating system has become accepted by both the scientific 
and enterprise user population. Today, Linux is by far the most versatile operating system. 
You can find Linux on embedded devices such as firewalls and cell phones and mainframes. 
Naturally, performance of the Linux operating system has become a hot topic for both 
scientific and enterprise users. However, calculating a global weather forecast and hosting a 
database impose different requirements on the operating system. Linux has to accommodate 
all possible usage scenarios with the most optimal performance. The consequence of this 
challenge is that most Linux distributions contain general tuning parameters to accommodate 
all users.
IBM® has embraced Linux, and it is recognized as an operating system suitable for 
enterprise-level applications running on IBM systems. Most enterprise applications are now 
available on Linux, including file and print servers, database servers, Web servers, and 
collaboration and mail servers.
With use of Linux in an enterprise-class server comes the need to monitor performance and, 
when necessary, tune the server to remove bottlenecks that affect users. This IBM Redpaper 
describes the methods you can use to tune Linux, tools that you can use to monitor and 
analyze server performance, and key tuning parameters for specific server applications. The 
purpose of this redpaper is to understand, analyze, and tune the Linux operating system to 
yield superior performance for any type of application you plan to run on these systems.
The tuning parameters, benchmark results, and monitoring tools used in our test environment 
were executed on Red Hat and Novell SUSE Linux kernel 2.6 systems running on IBM 
System x servers and IBM System z servers. However, the information in this redpaper 
should be helpful for all Linux hardware platforms.
How this Redpaper is structured
To help readers new to Linux or performance tuning get a fast start on the topic, we have 
structured this book the following way:
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Understanding the Linux operating system
This chapter introduces the factors that influence systems performance and the way the 
Linux operating system manages system resources. The reader is introduced to several 
important performance metrics that are needed to quantify system performance.
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Monitoring Linux performance
The second chapter introduces the various utilities that are available for Linux to measure 
and analyze systems performance.
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Analyzing performance bottlenecks
This chapter introduces the process of identifying and analyzing bottlenecks in the system.