From: Jonathan Williams (jonathw@shubertorg.com)
Date: Fri Oct 18 2002 - 15:34:21 EDT
We have tweaked our Informix config files enough, and feel that our databases
are running much much faster now. Now we want to look into tuning our main
production application server. It is an Alpha ES45 with 4GB RAM running Tru64
5.1a. Now that the database is running quickly, it has become very obvious that
the bottleneck is now the application server. The big bosses wanted to run out
and buy a couple gigs more memory figuring that would speed things up. But I
think we may want to look and see if we can tune what we have and go from there.
Now, on this application server, there is only one user--and it runs all the
production applications. So I'm thinking that there are probably some kernel
setting that are limiting what this one user is allowed to do...which would be a
wonderful thing if there were many users competing for system resources. But
like I said, there is only the one user on the system running about 30 separate
programs at any given time. These programs are all home-grown. This server
doesn't run anything other than the operating system and these programs...no
database stuff, no email, no anything extra at all. Can anyone recommend what
kernel settings I might want to tune to allow for this single user? I wouldn't
mind at all if it was allowed to use up 95% of all system resources if it wanted
to.
And...once I make these inevitable kernel changes...what's the best way to
monitor this users processes to see how he is sucking up the system
resources--and then at that point see if we need to upgrade anything. We have
"top" running constantly...as well as Big Brother (as a side note, this system's
load averages according to both Top and BB range anywhere from 3.5 to 11.7, but
it usually stays around 6 or so--which can't be a good thing).
Well...as always, any and all help is appreciated.
Jonathan Williams
Unix Systems Administrator
The Shubert Organization, Inc.
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