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    Driving the Power of AIX: Performance Tuning on IBM Power
    Driving the Power of AIX: Performance Tuning on IBM Power
    Driving the Power of AIX: Performance Tuning on IBM Power
    Ebook345 pages1 hour

    Driving the Power of AIX: Performance Tuning on IBM Power

    By Ken Milberg

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    About this ebook

    A concise reference for IT professionals, this book goes beyond the rules and contains the best practices and strategies for solid tuning methodology. Tips based on years of experience from an AIX tuning master show specific steps for monitoring and tuning CPU, virtual memory, disk I/O, and network components. Also offering techniques for tuning Oracle and Linux structures that run on an IBM power system—as well as for the new AIX 6.1—this manual discusses what tools are available, how to best use them to collect historical data, and when to analyze trends and results. The only comprehensive, up-to-date guide on AIX tuning, this is a must-have for administrators, systems engineers and architects, and other capacity planners.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMC Press
    Release dateNov 1, 2009
    ISBN9781583476116
    Driving the Power of AIX: Performance Tuning on IBM Power

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      Book preview

      Driving the Power of AIX - Ken Milberg

      Driving the Power of AIX®: Performance Tuning on IBM Power Systems™

      Ken Milberg

      Photography by Michele Huttler Silver, Michele Silver Photography

      First Printing—October 2009

      © 2009 Ken Milberg. All rights reserved.

      Portions © MC Press Online, LP

      Every attempt has been made to provide correct information. However, the publisher and the author do not guarantee the accuracy of the book and do not assume responsibility for information included in or omitted from it.

      IBM is a registered trademark of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. AIX, POWER and POWER6 are registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. All other product names are trademarked or copyrighted by their respective manufacturers.

      Printed in Canada. All rights reserved. This publication is protected by copyright, and permission must be obtained from the publisher prior to any prohibited reproduction, storage in a retrieval system, or transmission in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or likewise.

      MC Press offers excellent discounts on this book when ordered in quantity for bulk purchases or special sales, which may include custom covers and content particular to your business, training goals, marketing focus, and branding interest.

      For information regarding permissions or special orders, please contact:

      MC Press

      Corporate Offices

      125 N. Woodland Trail

      Lewisville, TX 75077 USA

      For information regarding sales and/or customer service, please contact:

      MC Press

      P.O. Box 4300

      Big Sandy, TX 75755-4300 USA

      ISBN: 978-158347-098-5

      Acknowledgements

      First and foremost, this book is dedicated to my children—Hadara, Ori, Rani and Elana, whom I love and adore with all my heart and who have been a constant source of joy to me throughout their lives. Thank you Vera, for providing me with these incredible children. Thank you Mom and Dad, for all the love you have given me through the years. This book is dedicated to my parent’s family, all of whom perished during the Holocaust, except for my dear Aunt Molly, who passed away several years ago and whom I still miss dearly.

      The publication of this book could not have been possible without the support and encouragement of many individuals throughout my career. I want to thank David Brodt for giving me my first job in systems and keeping me around even after I mistakenly destroyed his entire B90 Burroughs system (even though it was a Burroughs VMS bug) along with all his backups during a failed operations activity. I stayed on and led their project, my first, to convert their legacy system to Unix over 20 years ago—SCO Unix 3.2.2. I want to thank Terry Every for giving me my first opportunity in NYC in the early 1990s as a Unix Systems Manager, working on HP9000s and HP-UX. I learned so much from him, less about systems (though he is technical), and more about people and class.

      I want to thank Mark Mulconry for giving me my first opportunity to manage a large production IBM AIX environment and my homeboys at Empire BC/BS (Greg Pastuzyn, Steven Goldman, Steven Gerasimovich, Amit Goel, Arkady Getselis) as well as my homegal, Marilyn Walter. To Winston, an AIX system administrator who worked for me at the World Trade Center. We’ll always remember you. You will never be forgotten!

      I want to thank the folks at IBM, who at the turn of the century thought enough of me to put me on their AIX performance team in Washington DC, working for the US Census Bureau (which is perhaps where this whole train started).

      I want to thank Nicolete McFadden and Bharvi Parikh for their work helping me through many IBM initiatives, including founding and leading the NY Metro PowerAIX/Linux Users Group. And thanks go to Randy Default, the former President of COMMON, who made me a permanent Guest on their Board of Directors representing AIX interests. I want to thank Bess Protacio and her AIX team of Bradd Baldwin, Abid Khwaja, and Jonathan Mencher for the times we had at Adecco migrating to AIX from that nameless Sun Unix operating system. I want to thank Dan Raju and Wahid Ullah for the great AIX fun we had in Ann Arbor and Ed Braunstein for providing my first exposure to AIX in 1996, when I was a CIO (before my career starting going downhill) and for the great times we had at LAS.

      I want to thank Brian Shorter, Mitch Diodato, Bruce Slaven, Jennifer Weems and Tim Paramore at Arrow for giving me the confidence and tools to start my own company, PowerTCO an IBM Business Partner, and for Raffi Princian for believing in me and leading our first assessment. Thanks also to the fine folks at Future Tech (Bob Venero, Phil Preston, Karen Sinda, Mike Rosatto, Steven Vames, Bill Daub, and Lynn Keegan) who showed me the ropes of working for a BP.

      It must be said that I would not even have considered writing if not for the folks at TechTarget who took a chance years ago on a neophyte writer. Thank you TechTarget (in the early days it was Amy Kucharik and Jan Stafford) for sticking by me and helping me launch my Ask The Expert Linux site as well as my writing career. I still do quite a bit of work for searchdatacenter.techtarget.com and searchenterpriselinux.com and love the assignments (thank you Matt Stansberry and Leah Rosin). You can see my blog also at itknowledgeexchange, another TechTarget offering.

      I want to thank James Proescholdt, formerly of IBM Systems Magazine for giving me the opportunity to write for them and Rob McNelly, who runs their AIXchange blog, who provided me with contact information that enabled me to further my writing career with IBM. Thank you to Natalie Boike, my present editor at IBM Systems Magazine for all the fun work. I am also very thankful to Troy Mott at Backstop Media for being my editor/publisher on content through IBM developerWorks and for helping advise me during the early conceptual stages of my book.

      I want to thank Susan Schreitmueller, IBM’s most renowned and well-known performance expert, who reviewed my book and from whom I learned so much. And Jaqui Lynch, among other performance gurus, from whom I also learned so much through the years.

      Finally the publication of this book could not have been possible but for the ungrudging efforts put in by the writer of the foreword of my book, IBM Distinguished Engineer Joefon Jann, and for Chris Gibson, IBM AIX guru and writer who took the time out of his busy schedule to proofread the myriad mistakes in my first drafts.

      I want to thank Michele Huttler Silver, with Michele Silver Photography (msilverphotograpy.com) for the incredible job she did with the breathtaking photographs you will see interspersed throughout the book.

      And thanks again to my publisher Merrikay Lee—for giving me the opportunity to write this book, for believing in me, for sponsoring our book signing, book fair, and presentation seminar during the summer of 2009 in NYC and for taking a chance on an IBM Power AIX book. Thanks also go to my copy editor, Katie, for the stellar job. You are amazing!

      I’ll add a special mention to my dear friends, Steven and Shelly, Mitch and Candy, David and Laurie, who’ve always been there for me and my children, through thick and thin.

      Last, but definitely not least, thank you M—the love of my life, the one who makes my heart sing and race, and the one person in my life who has never wavered in her belief in me. You’re my muse and inspiration to keep going (with this book and through all life’s trials and tribulations), and one of the few folks who think that I am more than an idiot savant. You are the one who has helped keep things together for me, through good times and bad.

      —Ken Milberg

      September 2009

      Contents

      Foreword

      Preface

      SECTION I: INTRODUCTION

      Chapter 1: Performance Tuning Methodology

      Step 1. Establishing a Baseline

      Step 2. Stress Testing and Monitoring

      Step 3. Identifying the Bottleneck

      Step 4. Tuning

      Step 5. Repeat

      Chapter 2: Introduction to AIX

      Unix

      AIX

      AIX Market Share

      Chapter 3: Introduction to POWER Architecture

      POWER5

      POWER6

      Section I: Summary, Tips, and Quiz

      Summary

      Tips

      QUIZ

      Multiple Choice

      True or False

      Fill In the Blank(s)

      SECTION II: CPU

      Chapter 4: CPU: Introduction

      Chapter 5: CPU: Monitoring

      vmstat (Unix-generic)

      sar (Unix-generic)

      iostat (Unix-generic)

      w (Unix-generic)

      lparstat (AIX-specific)

      mpstat (AIX-specific)

      topas (AIX-specific)

      nmon

      Using nmon for Historical Analysis

      ps (Unix-generic)

      Tracing Tools

      tprof

      Timing Tools

      time

      timex

      Chapter 6: CPU: Tuning

      Process and Thread Management

      nice

      renice

      ps

      schedo

      sched_R and sched_D

      fixed_pri_global

      timeslice

      bindprocessor

      smtctl

      gprof

      Section II: Summary, Tips, and Quiz

      Summary

      Tips

      QUIZ

      Multiple Choice

      True or False

      Fill in the Blank(s)

      SECTION III: MEMORY

      Chapter 7: Memory: Introduction

      Virtual Memory Manager

      Computational Memory

      File Memory

      Paging and Swapping

      VMM Tuning Evolution

      Chapter 8: Memory: Monitoring

      vmstat (Unix-generic)

      Virtual Memory Summary

      sar (Unix-generic)

      lsps (AIX-specific)

      ps (Unix-generic)

      svmon (AIX-specific)

      Memory Leak

      Chapter 9: Memory: Tuning

      vmo

      minperm, maxperm, maxclient, and lru_file_repage

      minfree and maxfree

      Page Space Allocation

      How Much Paging Space?

      Paging Space Tuning

      Thrashing and Load Control

      Memory Scanning and lrubucket

      rmss

      Section III: Summary, Tips, and Quiz

      Summary

      Tips

      QUIZ

      Multiple Choice

      True or False

      Fill in the Blank(s)

      SECTION IV: DISK I/O

      Chapter 10: Disk I/O: Introduction

      Direct I/O

      Concurrent I/O

      Asynchronous I/O

      Logical Volumes and Disk Placement: Intra- and Inter-Policy

      Inter-Disk Policy

      File Systems

      Chapter 11: Disk I/O: Monitoring

      sar

      topas

      Logical Volume Monitoring

      AIX LVM Commands

      filemon and fileplace

      filemon

      fileplace

      Chapter 12: Disk I/O: Tuning

      lvmo

      ioo

      JFS2 Tuning Options

      Section IV: Summary, Tips, and Quiz

      Summary

      Tips

      QUIZ

      Multiple Choice

      True or False

      Fill in the Blank

      SECTION V NETWORK I/O

      Chapter 13: Network I/O: Introduction

      Network I/O Overview

      NFS

      Media Speed

      Network Subsystem Memory Management

      Virtual and Shared Ethernet

      Chapter 14: Network I/O: Monitoring

      netpmon

      Monitoring NFS

      nfsstat

      nfs4cl

      netpmon and NFS

      Monitoring Network Packets

      iptrace, ipreport, and ipfilter

      tcpdump

      Chapter 15: Network I/O: Tuning

      Name Resolution

      Maximum Transfer Unit

      Tuning: Client

      Tuning: Server

      Section V: Summary, Tips, and Quiz

      Summary

      Tips

      QUIZ

      Multiple Choice

      True or False

      Fill in the Blank

      SECTION VI: BONUS TOPICS

      Chapter 16: AIX 6.1

      Introduction

      Memory

      CPU

      Disk I/O

      JFS2

      iSCSI

      I/O Pacing

      Asynchronous I/O

      Network

      NFS

      Section VI: Chapter 16 Quiz

      Multiple Choice

      True or False

      Fill in the Blank

      Chapter 17: Tuning AIX for Oracle

      Memory

      CPU

      Asynchronous I/O Servers

      Concurrent I/O

      Oracle Tools

      Statspack

      Oracle Enterprise Manager

      Section VI: Chapter 17 Quiz

      Multiple Choice

      True or False

      Fill in the Blank

      Chapter 18: Linux on Power

      Monitoring

      Handy Linux Commands

      Virtualization

      Tuning

      Section VI: Chapter 18 Quiz

      Multiple Choice

      True or False

      Fill in the Blank(s)

      Quiz Answers

      Section I: Introduction

      Section II: CPU

      Section III: Memory

      Section IV: Disk I/O

      Section V: Network I/O

      Section VI / Chapter 16: AIX 6.1

      Section VI / Chapter 17: Tuning AIX for Oracle

      Section VI / Chapter 18: Linux on Power

      Foreword

      As computers have become increasingly sophisticated, the task of tuning the operating system to yield high performance for its applications while providing optimal total cost of ownership (TCO) for the IT owners has become increasingly complex. In the early days of computers, the OS typically ran only one application at a time, and most performance tuning was targeted at minimizing the number of instructions required to run the application within the limited resources (CPU, memory, disk/tape, networking) of a uniprocessor system. With advances in virtual memory, multitasking, multicore, caches, faster networks, huge storage devices and databases, and, in the past decade, the flourishing of virtualization technologies (e.g., LPARs, DLPARs, simultaneous multithreading, WPARs, virtual Ethernet, virtual SCSI), the task of performance

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