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Improving Linux Kernel Performance

Posted by michael on from the higher-faster-stronger dept.

developerWorks writes "The first step in improving Linux performance is quantifying it, but how exactly do you quantify performance for Linux or for comparable systems? In this article, members of the IBM Linux Technology Center share their expertise as they describe how they ran several benchmark tests on the Linux 2.4 and 2.5 kernels late last year. The benchmarks provide coverage for a diverse set of workloads, including Web serving, database, and file serving. In addition, we show the various components of the kernel (disk I/O subsystem, for example) that are stressed by each benchmark."

3 of 97 comments (clear)

  1. The Problems with Benchmarking like this... by dWhisper · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'm just curious what they are quantifying performance against. Everything here seemed to be strictly on the Network side of things. Are they trying to increase the actual Kernal processing of the individual threads for the network applications (File Serving, DB, and Webserving), or are they just measuring the eff. for the processing of data packets for the services.

    It sounds interesting, but it looks like the tuning is done specifically on the IBM platform, which makes me wonder. Linux already blows and MS product away for these applications, so I'm curious what they are comparing the results to. Did they just take an arbitrary point (processor load) for specific applications, or are they creating a specialized measurement (like SysMarks in Windows) that is only valid in their test suite.

    Anyway, it should be interesting to see where it ends up, eventually.

  2. Call me incredibly stupid, but.. by Subjective · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Wouldn't we (always) want to improve the Linux kernel performane in comparison to itself?

    Why is what we compare it to the most important issue?



    Sure, we want to see how the Linux kernel is performing, but that's unrelated to increasing it's performance - when working on the performance of a single part, people built a test for that part, and tweaked it.

    No benchmark or comparison is required in this case.

    --
    My other .sig is also this bad
  3. Usually not necessary by r6144 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I have installed linux several times, on different machines, now (mostly redhat). UDMA settings are almost always right on modern machines. The only exception is an old P166 machine with a very old HD, where the original kernel 2.2 does not support DMA on it, but 2.4 do (transfer rate 5MB/s -> 10MB/s). Fussing with the kernel usually doesn't give much benefit, and is definitely not for newcomers.

    Things actually useful are: disabling unnecessary services on startup (if you don't use atd, don't start it to save start-up time, and in many machines it is unnecessary to detect hardware changes using kudzu upon startup); for machines with multiple HD's, put the swap on the faster HD.