RH442 is an advanced 4-day hands-on lab course covering
system architecture, performance characteristics,
monitoring, benchmarking, and network performance tuning.
Audience:
RH442 is aimed at senior Red Hat Enterprise Linux system
administrators and other IT professionals working in
enterprise environments and mission-critical systems.
Prerequisites:
Participants in RH442 should already be familiar with Red
Hat Enterprise Linux. Recommended minimum competency level
is completion of the RHCE or equivalent knowledge.
Course
Outline:
1.
Basics: Principles and Terminology
·
What is performance tuning?
·
Steps in the tuning process
·
Quantifying performance
2.
Tools for Obtaining Information
·
The sysfs and proc filesystems and the sysctl utility
·
System process queues
·
The system activity reporter
·
Passing parameters to kernel modules
·
Generating reports using standard utilties
·
Benchmarking
·
Monitoring systems with SNMP and MRTG
3.
Monitoring the Kernel
·
Kernel profiling and OProfile
·
Monitoring the kernel with SystemTap
4.
Hardware Performance Considerations
·
Memory: levels, types
·
Cache
·
Disk and I/O
5.
The CPU: Processes and Scheduling
·
Controlling processor speed
·
How the Linux kernel schedules processes
·
Process priority
·
Obtaining processor performance information
6.
Memory
·
How Processes and the kernel utilize memory
·
System tunables that affect memory performance
·
How page and buffer caches work
·
Monitoring and controlling memory usage
·
The virtual memory subsystem
7.
The I/O Subsystem and Filesystems
·
Tuning the disk I/O subsystem
·
I/O scheduling
·
The virtual file system
·
File system tunable parameters
·
Layout of the ext2 and ext3 filesystems
·
Journaling
8.
Network Performance
·
Factors affecting performance
·
Viewing device information
·
Ethernet channel bonding
·
Network sockets
·
Layers of the OSI model
·
TCP tuning
9.
Application Tuning
·
Causes of performance problems
·
Application tuning
·
Viewing application behaviors using standard tools
·
NFS
·
Apache
·
Samba
