Re: Thoughts on subject breakdown

[Justin Couch <couch@ccis.adisys.com.au>]

Mat Kovach wrote:

> Along those lines, I think the site should be broken down a little
> bit differently:
> 
> o Tuning a System
> 
>  Since many people coming into the Linux fold from NT, Novell, etc
>  many are not setting up their filesystems, swap, memory, etc
>  in the most best way.

Couldn't agree more. However, what constitutes "tuning" of a system
without reference to what you are actually going to be doing with a box.
Apart from the machine that sits in the corner doing nothing, the box
typically has one or two specific functions that it should be tuned for.
Someone that builds a web server is very likely to have a completely
different hardware setup to the local departmental database
necessitating a different config for a "tuned" system (log/swap
locations, on/off machine syslogging etc).

I suppose this bring us down to a little more basic question: Linux
Performance Tuning - what is the basic aim of the information? Are we
providing the Every-man-and-his-dog site or just focusing on the higher
end "professional" tuning services? That is, what level of knowledge
assumption do we make? If we have to tell them that you shouldn't really
run a swap file and the database log on the same partition or that you
need to have swap space X times physical memory, are we providing
"tuning" information or just basic setup that any reasonable unix
sysadmin should know anyway? 

I see this along the same lines of  hardware recommendations (RAID vs
Single disk) that the reader should know already. I am biased towards
the higher end type site. However, I do like the idea of a general
"before you get started, have you checked these points" set of pages
that are sufficiently general so long as the focus of the site is not
that way inclined.

-- 
Justin Couch                                   Author, Java Hacker
Snr Software Engineer                     couch@ccis.adisys.com.au
ADI Ltd, Systems Group              http://www.vlc.com.au/~justin/
Java3D FAQ:       http://tintoy.ncsa.uiuc.edu/~srp/java3d/faq.html
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