Tag Archives: Articles

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Optimizing AIX 7 Network Performance

A new series on optimizing the network performance within AIX 7 is now available on IBM developerWorks. The series is in three parts:

Part 1, Network overview – Monitoring the hardware

With AIX 7 and the new POWER7 architecture, you have to think about the performance of your system, and also the effects of your network performance on both LPAR and WPAR environments. In the first installment, you’ll review some best practices for network configuration and utilize those practices for efficient monitoring of your hardware by taking advantage of network tools such as netstat, netpmon, entstat, and nmon. You’ll also examine certain tools used to look at your interfaces to see how to configure them.

Optimizing AIX 7 network performance: Part 1, Network overview – Monitoring the hardware

Part 2, NFS monitoring and tuning

With AIX 7 being used more frequently in network deployment environments, and with common use of workload partitions to help manage your resources, you must be aware of all the different applications and environments in which you need to optimize your network deployment. Part 2 focuses on tuning NFS. You’ll learn about monitoring utilities such as nfsstat and nmon, and you’ll also tune with nfso. The series also offers best practices for network I/O performance tuning.

Optimizing AIX 7 network performance: Part 2, NFS monitoring and tuning

Part 3, Monitoring your network packets and tuning the network

With AIX 7 being used more frequently in network deployment environments, and with common use of workload partitions to help manage your resources, you must be aware of all the different applications and environments in which you need to optimize your network deployment. Part 1 provided a networking overview and also discussed the tools you need to monitor your hardware, including netstat, netpmon, entstat, and nmon. Part 2 discussed monitoring and tuning NFS subsystems. This final segment, Part 3, shows you how to monitor network packets. The series also offers best practices for network I/O performance tuning.

Optimizing AIX 7 network performance: Part 3, Monitoring your network packets and tuning the network

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Optimizing AIX 7 memory performance

As part of the continuing series on AIX 7, a new series on optimizing memory performance is now available.

Part 1:

AIX® 7 takes advantage of the POWER7 CPU to improve memory usage within LPARs. While memory tuning might be more difficult to implement than processor or disk tuning, it is no less important. You can do more to tune memory on an AIX 7 server than on any other subsystem. Changing some memory parameters on your system can increase performance dramatically, particularly when these parameters are not optimized for the environment which you are running. This three-part series on memory tuning dives right into tuning parameters focusing on the many challenges and the various best practices of optimizing memory performance, and it also discusses some improvements in AIX 6 and AIX 7. Part 1 provides an overview of memory on AIX 7, including a discussion of virtual memory and the Virtual Memory Manager (VMM).

Optimizing AIX 7 memory performance: Part 1, Memory overview and tuning memory parameters

Part 2:

Use ps, sar, svmon, and vmstat to monitor memory usage and analyze the results. This three-part series focuses on the various aspects of memory management and tuning on IBM System p™ servers running AIX® 7, including taking advantage of the POWER7 CPU to improve memory usage within LPARs. Part 2 of the series focuses on the detail of actual memory subsystem monitoring and discusses how to analyze the results. Throughout the series, we also cover some of the best practices of memory performance tuning and monitoring.

Optimizing AIX 7 memory performance: Part 2, Monitoring memory usage (ps, sar, svmon, vmstat) and analyzing the results

Part 3:

Get an introduction to swap (paging) space, learn how to configure and administer it, capture statistics, and tune your Virtual Memory Manager (VMM) settings to provide for optimum swap (paging) space configuration and performance. With AIX 7, and the improvements for the POWER7 architecture, extracting the best performance out of your memory environment is critical. With the larger memory capacity and CPU cores, a better understanding of the VMM and your configuration will help you change your parameters to fit your requirements.

Optimizing AIX 7 memory performance: Part 3, Tuning swap space settings

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Optimizing AIX 7 performance: Part 1, 2 and 3

I’ve just been updating a series of articles on AIX 7 and the new functionality.

The first three cover the basics performance details.

For Part 1:

Learn more about configuring and monitoring AIX 7 based on the investigations of AIX 7 beta compared to the original articles based on AIX 5L. The article covers the support for direct I/O, concurrent I/O, asynchronous I/O, and best practices for each method of I/O implementation. This three-part series on the AIX® disk and I/O subsystem focuses on the challenges of optimizing disk I/O performance. While disk tuning is arguably less exciting than CPU or memory tuning, it is a crucial component in optimizing server performance. In fact, partly because disk I/O is your weakest subsystem link, you can do more to improve disk I/O performance than on any other subsystem.

Optimizing AIX 7 performance: Part 1, Disk I/O overview and long-term monitoring tools (sar, nmon, and topas)

For Part 2:

Discover how to use appropriate disk placement prior to creating your logical volumes to improve disk performance. These investigations are based on AIX 7 beta and updating information from the original AIX 5L version of this article. Part 2 of this series focuses on monitoring your logical volumes and the commands and utilities (iostat, lvmstat, lslv, lspv, and lsvg) used to analyze results.

Optimizing AIX 7 performance: Part 2, Monitoring logical volumes and analyzing the results

For Part 3:

Part 3 of the AIX 7 performance series covers how to improve overall file system performance, how to tune your systems with the ioo command, and how to use the filemon and fileplace utilities. You will also learn about JFS and JFS2 that is available in AIX7.

Optimizing AIX 7 performance: Part 3, Tune with ioo, filemon, fileplace, JFS and JFS2

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Xapian/Omega

A new article on indexing documents using the Xapian/Omega toolkit is now available.

From the intro:

Storing and providing access to documentation and information is an ever-growing problem for many companies. There are many solutions, including wikis and structured documentation stores, but full-text indexes are often the only way to gain the information you need from a wide array of documents. Xapian is an open source tool that reads and indexes documents, including those in HTML, PDF, OpenOffice, Microsoft® Office®, and many others, and with programmable interfaces to add and extract information, including Java™ technology, allowing you to support document indexing within your IBM WebSphere®-deployed environment. Examine how to install and deploy a typical Xapian installation indexing a variety of information, then see some examples for extracting the information using the different language bindings. The process will focus on how this could be used within a typical company intranet environment. The article will also provide a quick overview of Omega, a custom tool designed to work with the Xapian infrastructure.

Read: Read and index documents with Xapian and Omega

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Take advantage of using libevent and libev

I have a new article available on making use of the libevent and libev libraries. libevent has become a very popular choice for people that want to build very efficient I/O systems, particularly for network solutions, and therefore it fits nicely into applications like memcached and lighttpd, both of which make use of the event driven architecture.

From the intro:

Building a modern server application requires a method of accepting hundreds, thousands, and even tens of thousands of events simultaneously, whether they are internal requests or network connections effectively handling their operation. There are many solutions available, but the libevent library and libev libraries have both revolutionized the performance and event handling capability. In this article, we will examine the basic structure and methods available for using and deploying these solutions within your UNIX® applications. Both libev and libevent can be used in your high performance applications, including those deployed within the IBM Cloud or Amazon EC2 environment, where you need to support large numbers of simultaneous clients or operations.

Read the article: Boost network performance with libevent and libev

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Applying memcached to increase site performance

A new article on using memcached, the memory caching tool, to improve website and application performance is now available on IBM developerWorks:

The open source memcached tool is a cache for storing frequently used information to save you from loading (and processing) information from slower sources, such as disks or a database. It can be deployed in a dedicated situation or as a method of using up spare memory in an existing environment. Despite the simplicity of memcached, it is sometimes used incorrectly, or it is used as a solution in the wrong type of environment. Learn when it is best to take advantage of using memcached.

Read Applying memcached to increase site performance

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Adding DTrace probes to your applications

A new article on adding DTrace probes to your application has been published on IBM developerWorks:

DTrace provides a rich environment of probes that can be used to monitor the execution of your system, from the kernel up to your application. You can perform a significant amount of examination without changing your application, but to get detailed statistics, you need to add probes to your application. In this article we will examine how to design the probes, where to add them into your application, the best locations for the probes, and how to effectively build and use the probes that you have added.

Read Adding DTrace probes to your applications

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Deploying Gearman across multiple environments

A new article on using the work distribution tool, Gearman:

The open source Gearman service allows you to easily distribute work to other machines in your network, either because you want to spread the work over a large body of machines or because you want to share the functionality of different languages and environments with each other. In this article, you will look at some typical uses of Gearman and how it can solve a variety of issues and problems in modern applications. You will also learn how Gearman can be combined with other tools, like memcached, to help speed up your application and processing requirements.

I’ve tried to pay particular attention to using it where you might normally use RPC or web services, or when you want to execute large quantities of jobs and spread them over a number of machines or different parameters.

Read it Deploying Gearman across multiple environments

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Deep-protocol analysis of UNIX networks

A new article on deeper analysis of network packets, is now available on IBM developerWorks:

Whether you are monitoring your network to identify performance issues, debugging an application, or have found an application on your network that you do not recognize, occasionally you need to look deep into the protocols being used on your UNIX® network to understand what they are doing. Some protocols are easy to identify and understand, even when used on non-standard ports. Others need more investigation to understand what they are doing and what information they are exchanging. In this article, we will take a look at techniques for performing detailed analysis of the protocols in use on your UNIX network.

The piece specifically looks at ways of extracting more detailed information from the raw data you see on your network.

Read Deep-protocol analysis of UNIX networks

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Saving money with open source, Part 3: The OpenChange solution offers great promise

The third and final part of my series on saving money with open source covers the OpenChange mail server, designed to provide a complete, protocol and functionally equivalent collaboration environment to Microsoft’s Exchange server.

From the article:

In today’s economic climate, everyone is looking for ways to reduce expenses. In the IT sector, one way to cut costs is by turning to open source alternatives instead of using expensive licensed products. This last part of our series explores OpenChange, which is designed to be used as an Exchange groupware server. E-mail is probably the backbone of your business; When the e-mail servers go down, everything can quickly grind to a halt. In this article, learn about the OpenChange e-mail server and whether it is ready for prime time.

Read: Saving money with open source, Part 3: The OpenChange solution offers great promise