finding bottlenecks on ubuntu systems

[Joseph Salisbury]

On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 2:12 PM, Joseph Salisbury
<josephtsalisbury at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 9:14 AM, Mark van Harmelen
> <markvanharmelen at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi everyone
>>
>> I've never done this before so all hints would be gratefully received.
>>
>> We are running a 9.04 server, with a single unthreaded process that is of
>> interest, basically one that is busy transforming the contents of a mysql
>> db. I want to find out if we can improve the performance of this process.
>>
>> Seems potential limitations are
>>
>> - limited by CPU speed
>> - limited by access to mysql data on disc
>> - limited by memory size, and therefore spending its time paging
>>
>> I'm wondering if anyone has any great commands  and/or command options for
>> me to start my investigations with, please.
>
> If you haven't already, install the sysstat package:
>
> sudo apt-get install sysstat
>
> This will give you some tools to gather performance statistics.  To
> start you need to identify where the bottleneck is.  Use cpustat to
> see if you are cpu bound, iostat to see if you are disk bound, vmstat
> for pageing / memory stats, etc.

Woops: s/cpustat/mpstat/g :-)

>
> For more detailed analysis, you can install and use profiling tools
> such as oprofile or systemtap.
>
>>
>> Or any strategies, words of advice, or (instructional) sources that you
>> found useful in tuning your own systems.
>
> This can be an open ended question when it comes to performance
> tuning.  The very simple answer is find your bottleneck and fix it.
> There will always be a bottleneck and it will always move to another
> resource once you fix it.  The goal is to have your cpu become the
> bottleneck(Then continue to tune your application).
>
> It is best to try and tune your application first to use the available
> resource most efficiently.  Don't just add more memory because your
> swapping.  First identify why the process is consuming so much memory
> in the first place.
>
> Hope this helps,
>
> Joe
>
>>
>> thanks
>> mark
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
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>>
>