Server filesystem performance tuning resources

When hit with slow performance of a hosted application its easily to quickly turn attention to hardware but it's not always the best solution. Optimisation of system configuration will often generate significantly greater performance improvements than can be achieved with hardware. The first step is making sure you know whether your application is CPU, Memory or I/O bound. If you're convinced it's I/O bound then we've get some tips for improving the performance of your dedicated server.

• Add noatime to your mount options. For already-mounted file systems do something like:

  mount /data -o remount,noatime

• If using ext3, make sure directory indexes are enabled (will make fsck slower, though)
• When creating a new ext3 filesystem on a RAID array, let the file system know about the underlying layout

  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stride_of_an_array

  • http://www.nabble.com/Calculating-stride-values--t3874762.html

• http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Disk_Optimization

• http://www.nabble.com/RFC:-Tuning-ext3-t3774153.html

• http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Gentoo_Install_on_Software_RAID

Benchmarking tools

• Linux

  • http://sourceforge.net/projects/tiobench/

  • http://www.cs.duke.edu/ari/fstress/

  • http://www.iozone.org/

  • http://samba.org/ftp/tridge/dbench/README

  • http://code.google.com/p/bonnie-64/ Bonnie-64 (successor of Bonnie)

  • http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++/ Bonnie++ (Fork of original Bonnie)

  • http://www.csamuel.org/articles/emerging-filesystems-200709/ Benchmark article on new filesystems as of 09/2007

• Windows

  • ftp://download.intel.com/design/servers/iometer/iometer.zip

  • winbench

Research papers

• http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~enightin/syncio.ps Rethink the sync research paper

• http://osdi2006.blogspot.com/2006/10/paper-rethink-sync_31.html