Monitoring and Tuning Performance

On a modern stand-alone system, Linux is pretty quick, and if it isn’t, there’s something wrong — something that is up to the system administrator to fix. You might have a number of people using the same fileserver,
mail server, or other shared machine, in which small improvements in system performance can mean a lot.

System tuning is an ongoing process carried by a variety of  monitoringtools. Some performance decisions are made at installation time, while others are added or configured later.

Proper monitoring can detect a misbehaving application that might be consuming more system resources than it should or failing to exit completely on close. Through the use of system performance tools you can determine when hardware — such as memory, added storage, or even something as elaborate as a hardware RAID — should be upgraded for more cost-effective use of a machine in the enterprise. Possibly most important, careful system monitoring give you an early idea when a system component is showing early signs offailure, so that any potential downtime can be minimized.

Careful system monitoring and built-in configurability of Linux allows you to squeeze the best possible performance from your existing equipment, from customizing video drivers to applying special kernel patches to simply turning off unneeded services to free memory and processor cycles.