TABLE OF CONTENTS The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself.
Benjamin Franklin
Computer systems are increasingly being used to handle specialized functions, rather than for general-purpose computing like we used to see in the old days. We believe this trend works in our favor because a system that performs only one or a few tasks is much easier to tune to perform optimally than a general-purpose system. We have developed, over the course of many years, a set of instructions that you should follow to install and maintain your system in an optimal fashion. We are primarily concerned with file systems, so we do not cover the finer points of kernel tuning or network performance, but these steps are general enough to be applicable to a performance issue in those areas as well.
In this chapter, we give you some examples of the "standard" types of systems that we have seen at customer sites. We define four example system types: the Usenet News or e-mail server, the large database server, the Internet or Web server, and the NFS server. These examples will not be exactly like your system, but they should give you an idea of how to set up such a system and of what kinds of things you should be looking for in order to make the system perform well, for its assigned task.
There isn't any magic bullet for system tuning.
