SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop Documentation › System Analysis and Tuning Guide

SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 12

System Analysis and Tuning Guide

An administrator's guide for problem detection, resolution and optimization. Find how to inspect and optimize your system by means of monitoring tools and how to efficiently manage resources. Also contains an overview of common problems and solutions and of additional help and documentation resources.

Publication date: Feb 19 2015

About This Guide

Available Documentation
Feedback
Documentation Conventions

I Basics

1 General Notes on System Tuning

1.1 Be Sure What Problem to Solve
1.2 Rule Out Common Problems
1.3 Finding the Bottleneck
1.4 Step-by-step Tuning

II System Monitoring

2 System Monitoring Utilities

2.1 Multi-Purpose Tools
2.2 System Information
2.3 Processes
2.4 Memory
2.5 Networking
2.6 The /proc File System
2.7 Hardware Information
2.8 Files and File Systems
2.9 User Information
2.10 Time and Date
2.11 Graph Your Data: RRDtool

3 Analyzing and Managing System Log Files

3.1 System Log Files in /var/log/
3.2 Viewing and Parsing Log Files
3.3 Managing Log Files with logrotate
3.4 Monitoring Log Files with logwatch
3.5 Using logger to Make System Log Entries

III Kernel Monitoring

4 SystemTap—Filtering and Analyzing System Data

4.1 Conceptual Overview
4.2 Installation and Setup
4.3 Script Syntax
4.4 Example Script
4.5 User-Space Probing
4.6 For More Information

5 Kernel Probes

5.1 Supported Architectures
5.2 Types of Kernel Probes
5.3 Kprobes API
5.4 debugfs Interface
5.5 For More Information

6 OProfile—System-Wide Profiler

6.1 Conceptual Overview
6.2 Installation and Requirements
6.3 Available OProfile Utilities
6.4 Using OProfile
6.5 Using OProfile's GUI
6.6 Generating Reports
6.7 For More Information

IV Resource Management

7 General System Resource Management

7.1 Planning the Installation
7.2 Disabling Unnecessary Services
7.3 File Systems and Disk Access

8 Kernel Control Groups

8.1 Technical Overview and Definitions
8.2 Scenario
8.3 Control Group Subsystems
8.4 Using Controller Groups
8.5 For More Information

9 Automatic Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) Balancing

9.1 Implementation
9.2 Configuration
9.3 Monitoring
9.4 Impact

10 Power Management

10.1 Power Management at CPU Level
10.2 The Linux Kernel CPUfreq Infrastructure
10.3 Viewing, Monitoring and Tuning Power-related Settings
10.4 Special Tuning Options
10.5 Troubleshooting
10.6 For More Information

V Kernel Tuning

11 Tuning I/O Performance

11.1 Switching I/O Scheduling
11.2 Available I/O Elevators
11.3 I/O Barrier Tuning

12 Tuning the Task Scheduler

12.1 Introduction
12.2 Process Classification
12.3 Completely Fair Scheduler
12.4 For More Information

13 Tuning the Memory Management Subsystem

13.1 Memory Usage
13.2 Reducing Memory Usage
13.3 Virtual Memory Manager (VM) Tunable Parameters
13.4 Monitoring VM Behavior

14 Tuning the Network

14.1 Configurable Kernel Socket Buffers
14.2 Detecting Network Bottlenecks and Analyzing Network Traffic
14.3 Netfilter
14.4 For More Information

VI Handling System Dumps

15 Tracing Tools

15.1 Tracing System Calls with strace
15.2 Tracing Library Calls with ltrace
15.3 Debugging and Profiling with Valgrind
15.4 For More Information

16 Kexec and Kdump

16.1 Introduction
16.2 Required Packages
16.3 Kexec Internals
16.4 Basic Kexec Usage
16.5 How to Configure Kexec for Routine Reboots
16.6 Basic Kdump Configuration
16.7 Analyzing the Crash Dump
16.8 Advanced Kdump Configuration
16.9 For More Information

A Documentation Updates

A.1 February 2015 (Documentation Maintenance Update)
A.2 October 2014 (Initial Release of SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 12)

B GNU Licenses

B.1 GNU Free Documentation License

List of Figures

2.1 Example Graph Created with RRDtool
6.1 GUI for OProfile
8.1 Resource Planning
16.1 YaST Kdump Module: Start-Up Page

List of Tables

2.1 List of Query Options of ethtool
10.1 C-States
16.1 Recommended Values for Additional Kernel Command Line Parameters

List of Examples

2.1 vmstat Output on a Lightly Used Machine
2.2 vmstat Output on a Heavily Used Machine (CPU bound)
3.1 Example for /etc/logrotate.conf
4.1 Simple SystemTap Script
4.2 Probe with Timer Event
4.3 printf Function with Format Specifiers
4.4 Using Global Variables
4.5 Monitoring Incoming TCP Connections with tcp_connections.stp
10.1 Example Output of cpufreq-info
10.2 Example Output of cpupower frequency-info
10.3 Example Output of cpupower idle-info
10.4 Example cpupower monitor Output
10.5 Example powerTOP Output
11.1 Increasing individual thread throughput using CFQ

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or (at your option) version 1.3; with the Invariant Section being this copyright notice and license. A copy of the license version 1.2 is included in the section entitled “GNU Free Documentation License”.

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All information found in this book has been compiled with utmost attention to detail. However, this does not guarantee complete accuracy. Neither SUSE LLC, its affiliates, the authors nor the translators shall be held liable for possible errors or the consequences thereof.

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