Performance Analysis: Day 2
Nov. 25th, 2008 06:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sawylToday's discussions focused on the virtual memory subsystem and the LVM, and their contributions to overall system performance.
We started out by running through some of the basics principles of VM and the slightly odd terminology used by AIX to refer to the different sections of memory. We went on to talk about the way that AIX merges classic swapping with disc caching, the way that heavy IO activity may cause computational pages to be erroneously dumped to the backing store and the way that the VM manager can be tuned so that it preferentially drops file pages ahead of application data. We then looked at methods for tracking down memory heavy applications and did a few labs to reinforce the points.
After lunch, we examined the various LVM parameters and configuration options, such as active versus passive, that might have some sort of impact on performance. We then discussed some of the standard tools available to monitor IO performance before doing a couple of labs where we investigated how application performance varied as we changed the settings of the LVM.
All rather enjoyable.
We started out by running through some of the basics principles of VM and the slightly odd terminology used by AIX to refer to the different sections of memory. We went on to talk about the way that AIX merges classic swapping with disc caching, the way that heavy IO activity may cause computational pages to be erroneously dumped to the backing store and the way that the VM manager can be tuned so that it preferentially drops file pages ahead of application data. We then looked at methods for tracking down memory heavy applications and did a few labs to reinforce the points.
After lunch, we examined the various LVM parameters and configuration options, such as active versus passive, that might have some sort of impact on performance. We then discussed some of the standard tools available to monitor IO performance before doing a couple of labs where we investigated how application performance varied as we changed the settings of the LVM.
All rather enjoyable.
