IBM REDP-4285-00 User Manual

®

REDP-4285-00

Draft Document for Review May 4, 2007 11:35 am

IBM Redbooks are developed 
by the IBM International 
Technical Support 
Organization. Experts from 
IBM, Customers and Partners 
from around the world create 
timely technical information 
based on realistic scenarios. 
Specific recommendations 
are provided to help you 
implement IT solutions more 
effectively in your 
environment.

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.