SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP4 System Analysis and Tuning Guide System Analysis and Tuning Guide SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP4 Publication Date: September 24, 2021 SUSE LLC 1800 South Novell Place Provo, UT 84606 USA https://documentation.suse.com Copyright © 2006– 2021 SUSE LLC and contributors. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or (at your option) version 1.3; with the Invariant Section being this copyright notice and license. A copy of the license version 1.2 is included in the section entitled “GNU Free Documentation License”. For SUSE trademarks, see http://www.suse.com/company/legal/ . All other third party trademarks are the property of their respective owners. A trademark symbol (®, ™ etc.) denotes a SUSE or Novell trademark; an asterisk (*) denotes a third party trademark. All information found in this book has been compiled with utmost attention to detail. However, this does not guarantee complete accuracy. Neither SUSE LLC, its aliates, the authors nor the translators shall be held liable for possible errors or the consequences thereof. Contents About This Guide xi 1 Available Documentation xii 2 Feedback xiv 3 Documentation Conventions xv I BASICS 1 1 General Notes on System Tuning 2 1.1 Be Sure What Problem to Solve 2 1.2 Rule Out Common Problems 3 1.3 Finding the Bottleneck 3 1.4 Step-by-step Tuning 4 II SYSTEM MONITORING 5 2 System Monitoring Utilities 6 2.1 Multi-Purpose Tools 6 vmstat 7 • System Activity Information: sar and sadc 9 2.2 System Information 13 Device Load Information: iostat 13 • Processor Activity Monitoring: mpstat 14 • Task Monitoring: pidstat 15 • Kernel Ring Buffer: dmesg 15 • List of Open Files: lsof 16 • Kernel and udev Event Sequence Viewer: udevadm monitor 17 • Information on Security Events: audit 18 2.3 Processes 18 Interprocess Communication: ipcs 18 • Process List: ps 19 • Process Tree: pstree 20 • Table of Processes: top 21 • System z hypervisor iii System Analysis and Tuning Guide monitor: hyptop 22 • A top-like I/O Monitor: iotop 24 • Modify a process' niceness: nice and renice 25 2.4 Memory 25 Memory Usage: free 25 • Detailed Memory Usage: /proc/ meminfo 26 • Process Memory Usage: smaps 28 2.5 Networking 28 Basic Network Diagnostics: ifconfig 28 • Ethernet Cards in Detail: ethtool 29 • Show the Network Status: netstat 30 • Interactive Network Monitor: iptraf 31 2.6 The /proc File System 32 procinfo 34 • System Control Parameters: /proc/sys/ 35 2.7 Hardware Information 36 PCI Resources: lspci 36 • USB Devices: lsusb 37 2.8 Files and File Systems 38 Determine the File Type: file 38 • File Systems and Their Usage: mount, df and du 38 • Additional Information about ELF Binaries 39 • File Properties: stat 40 2.9 User Information 40 User Accessing Files: fuser 40 • Who Is Doing What: w 41 2.10 Time and Date 41 Time Measurement with time 41 2.11 Graph Your Data: RRDtool 41 How RRDtool Works 42 • Simple Real Life Example 42 • For More Information 47 3 Monitoring with Nagios 48 3.1 Features of Nagios 48 3.2 Installing Nagios 48 3.3 Nagios Configuration Files 49 Object Definition Files 49 iv System Analysis and Tuning Guide 3.4 Configuring Nagios 51 Monitoring Remote Services with Nagios 52 • Monitoring Remote Host- Resources with Nagios 53 3.5 Troubleshooting 55 3.6 For More Information 55 4 Analyzing and Managing System Log Files 57 4.1 System Log Files in /var/log/ 57 4.2 Viewing and Parsing Log Files 60 4.3 Managing Log Files with logrotate 60 4.4 Monitoring Log Files with logwatch 61 4.5 Using logger to Make System Log Entries 62 III KERNEL MONITORING 63 5 SystemTap—Filtering and Analyzing System Data 64 5.1 Conceptual Overview 64 SystemTap Scripts 64 • Tapsets 65 • Commands and Privileges 65 • Important Files and Directories 66 5.2 Installation and Setup 67 5.3 Script Syntax 68 Probe Format 69 • SystemTap Events (Probe Points) 70 • SystemTap Handlers (Probe Body) 71 5.4 Example Script 75 5.5 User-Space Probing 76 5.6 For More Information 77 6 Kernel Probes 78 6.1 Supported Architectures 78 v System Analysis and Tuning Guide 6.2 Types of Kernel Probes 79 Kprobe 79 • Jprobe 79 • Return Probe 80 6.3 Kernel probes API 80 6.4 Debugfs Interface 81 How to List Registered Kernel Probes 81 • How to Switch All Kernel Probes On or Off 81 6.5 For More Information 82 7 Perfmon2—Hardware-Based Performance Monitoring 83 7.1 Conceptual Overview 83 Perfmon2 Structure 83 • Sampling and Counting 84 7.2 Installation 85 7.3 Using Perfmon 86 Getting Event Information 87 • Enabling System-Wide Sessions 88 • Monitoring Running Tasks 89 7.4 Retrieving Metrics From DebugFS 90 7.5 For More Information 92 8 OProfile—System-Wide Profiler 94 8.1 Conceptual Overview 94 8.2 Installation and Requirements 94 8.3 Available OProfile Utilities 95 8.4 Using OProfile 95 General Steps 95 • Getting Event Configurations 97 8.5 Using OProfile's GUI 98 8.6 Generating Reports 98 8.7 For More Information 99 vi System Analysis and Tuning Guide IV RESOURCE MANAGEMENT 101 9 General System Resource Management 102 9.1 Planning the Installation 102 Partitioning 102 • Installation Scope 103 • Default Runlevel 103 9.2 Disabling Unnecessary Services 104 9.3 File Systems and Disk Access 105 File Systems 105 • Disabling Access Time (atime) Updates 105 • Prioritizing Disk Access with ionice 106 10 Kernel Control Groups 107 10.1 Technical Overview and Definitions 107 10.2 Scenario 108 10.3 Control Group Subsystems 109 10.4 Using Controller Groups 112 Prerequisites 112 • Checking the Environment 112 • Example: Cpusets 113 • Example: cgroups 114 10.5 For More Information 115 11 Power Management 117 11.1 Power Management at CPU Level 117 C-States (Processor Operating States) 117 • P-States (Processor Performance States) 119 • T-States (Processor Throttling States) 119 • Turbo Features 119 11.2 The Linux Kernel CPUfreq Infrastructure 120 In-Kernel Governors 120 • Related Files and Directories 122 11.3 Viewing, Monitoring and Tuning Power-related Settings 122 Using the cpufrequtils Tools 123 • Using the cpupower Tools 124 • Monitoring Power Consumption with powerTOP 128 11.4 Special Tuning Options 129 Tuning Options for P-States 129 • Tuning Options for C-states 131 vii System Analysis and Tuning Guide 11.5 Creating and Using Power Management Profiles 132 11.6 Troubleshooting 133 11.7 For More Information 134 V KERNEL TUNING 136 12 Installing Multiple Kernel Versions 137 12.1 Enabling and Configuring Multiversion Support 138 Automatically Deleting Unused Kernels 138 12.2 Installing/Removing Multiple Kernel Versions with YaST 139 12.3 Installing/Removing Multiple Kernel Versions with zypper 140 13 Tuning I/O Performance 142 13.1 Switching I/O Scheduling 142 13.2 Available I/O Elevators 143 CFQ (Completely Fair Queuing) 143 • NOOP 144 • DEADLINE 144 13.3 I/O Barrier Tuning 145 14 Tuning the Task Scheduler 146 14.1 Introduction 146 Preemption 146 • Timeslice 147 • Process Priority 147 14.2 Process Classification 147 14.3 O(1) Scheduler 148 14.4 Completely Fair Scheduler 149 How CFS Works 149 • Grouping Processes 150 • Kernel Configuration Options 150 • Terminology 150 • Changing Real- time Attributes of Processes with chrt 151 • Runtime Tuning with sysctl 152 • Debugging Interface and Scheduler Statistics 155 14.5 For More Information 157 viii System Analysis and Tuning Guide 15 Tuning the Memory Management Subsystem 158 15.1 Memory Usage 158 Anonymous Memory 159 • Pagecache 159 • Buffercache 159 • Buffer Heads 159 • Writeback 159 • Readahead 160 • VFS caches 160 15.2 Reducing Memory Usage 160 Reducing malloc (Anonymous) Usage 160 • Reducing Kernel Memory Overheads 161 • Memory Controller (Memory Cgroups) 161 15.3 Virtual Memory Manager (VM) Tunable Parameters 161 Reclaim Ratios 161 • Writeback Parameters 162 • Readahead parameters 163 • Further VM Parameters 164 15.4 Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) 164 15.5 Monitoring VM Behavior 164 16 Tuning the Network 165 16.1 Configurable Kernel Socket Buffers 165 16.2 Detecting Network Bottlenecks and Analyzing Network Traffic 167 16.3 Netfilter 167 16.4 Improving the Network Performance with Receive Packet Steering (RPS) 168 16.5 For More Information 169 VI HANDLING SYSTEM DUMPS 170 17 Tracing Tools 171 17.1 Tracing System Calls with strace 171 17.2 Tracing Library Calls with ltrace 174 17.3 Debugging and Profiling with Valgrind 176 Installation 176 • Supported Architectures 176 • General Information 176 • Default Options 177 • How Valgrind Works 178 • Messages 178 • Error Messages 180 ix System Analysis and Tuning Guide 17.4 For More Information 181 18 kexec and kdump 182 18.1 Introduction 182 18.2 Required Packages 182 18.3 kexec Internals 183 18.4 Basic kexec Usage 184 18.5 How to Configure kexec for Routine Reboots 185 18.6 Basic kdump Configuration 185 Manual kdump Configuration 186 • YaST Configuration 188 18.7 Analyzing the Crash Dump 189 Kernel Binary Formats 190 18.8 Advanced kdump Configuration 194 18.9 For More Information 195 A GNU Licenses 196 x System Analysis and Tuning Guide About This Guide SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is used for a broad range of usage scenarios in enterprise and scientic data centers. SUSE has ensured SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is set up in a way that it accommodates dierent operation purposes with optimal performance. However, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server must meet very dierent demands when employed on a number crunching server compared to a le server, for example. Generally it is not possible to ship a distribution that will by default be optimized for all kinds of workloads.