xref: /freebsd/share/man/man7/tuning.7 (revision 058ac3e8063366dafa634d9107642e12b038bf09)
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25.\" $FreeBSD$
26.\"
27.Dd October 11, 2022
28.Dt TUNING 7
29.Os
30.Sh NAME
31.Nm tuning
32.Nd performance tuning under FreeBSD
33.Sh SYSTEM SETUP - DISKLABEL, NEWFS, TUNEFS, SWAP
34The swap partition should typically be approximately 2x the size of
35main memory
36for systems with less than 4GB of RAM, or approximately equal to
37the size of main memory
38if you have more.
39Keep in mind future memory
40expansion when sizing the swap partition.
41Configuring too little swap can lead
42to inefficiencies in the VM page scanning code as well as create issues
43later on if you add more memory to your machine.
44On larger systems
45with multiple disks, configure swap on each drive.
46The swap partitions on the drives should be approximately the same size.
47The kernel can handle arbitrary sizes but
48internal data structures scale to 4 times the largest swap partition.
49Keeping
50the swap partitions near the same size will allow the kernel to optimally
51stripe swap space across the N disks.
52Do not worry about overdoing it a
53little, swap space is the saving grace of
54.Ux
55and even if you do not normally use much swap, it can give you more time to
56recover from a runaway program before being forced to reboot.
57.Pp
58It is not a good idea to make one large partition.
59First,
60each partition has different operational characteristics and separating them
61allows the file system to tune itself to those characteristics.
62For example,
63the root and
64.Pa /usr
65partitions are read-mostly, with very little writing, while
66a lot of reading and writing could occur in
67.Pa /var/tmp .
68By properly
69partitioning your system fragmentation introduced in the smaller more
70heavily write-loaded partitions will not bleed over into the mostly-read
71partitions.
72.Pp
73Properly partitioning your system also allows you to tune
74.Xr newfs 8 ,
75and
76.Xr tunefs 8
77parameters.
78The only
79.Xr tunefs 8
80option worthwhile turning on is
81.Em softupdates
82with
83.Dq Li "tunefs -n enable /filesystem" .
84Softupdates drastically improves meta-data performance, mainly file
85creation and deletion.
86We recommend enabling softupdates on most file systems; however, there
87are two limitations to softupdates that you should be aware of when
88determining whether to use it on a file system.
89First, softupdates guarantees file system consistency in the
90case of a crash but could very easily be several seconds (even a minute!\&)
91behind on pending write to the physical disk.
92If you crash you may lose more work
93than otherwise.
94Secondly, softupdates delays the freeing of file system
95blocks.
96If you have a file system (such as the root file system) which is
97close to full, doing a major update of it, e.g.,\&
98.Dq Li "make installworld" ,
99can run it out of space and cause the update to fail.
100For this reason, softupdates will not be enabled on the root file system
101during a typical install.
102There is no loss of performance since the root
103file system is rarely written to.
104.Pp
105A number of run-time
106.Xr mount 8
107options exist that can help you tune the system.
108The most obvious and most dangerous one is
109.Cm async .
110Only use this option in conjunction with
111.Xr gjournal 8 ,
112as it is far too dangerous on a normal file system.
113A less dangerous and more
114useful
115.Xr mount 8
116option is called
117.Cm noatime .
118.Ux
119file systems normally update the last-accessed time of a file or
120directory whenever it is accessed.
121This operation is handled in
122.Fx
123with a delayed write and normally does not create a burden on the system.
124However, if your system is accessing a huge number of files on a continuing
125basis the buffer cache can wind up getting polluted with atime updates,
126creating a burden on the system.
127For example, if you are running a heavily
128loaded web site, or a news server with lots of readers, you might want to
129consider turning off atime updates on your larger partitions with this
130.Xr mount 8
131option.
132However, you should not gratuitously turn off atime
133updates everywhere.
134For example, the
135.Pa /var
136file system customarily
137holds mailboxes, and atime (in combination with mtime) is used to
138determine whether a mailbox has new mail.
139You might as well leave
140atime turned on for mostly read-only partitions such as
141.Pa /
142and
143.Pa /usr
144as well.
145This is especially useful for
146.Pa /
147since some system utilities
148use the atime field for reporting.
149.Sh STRIPING DISKS
150In larger systems you can stripe partitions from several drives together
151to create a much larger overall partition.
152Striping can also improve
153the performance of a file system by splitting I/O operations across two
154or more disks.
155The
156.Xr gstripe 8 ,
157.Xr gvinum 8 ,
158and
159.Xr ccdconfig 8
160utilities may be used to create simple striped file systems.
161Generally
162speaking, striping smaller partitions such as the root and
163.Pa /var/tmp ,
164or essentially read-only partitions such as
165.Pa /usr
166is a complete waste of time.
167You should only stripe partitions that require serious I/O performance,
168typically
169.Pa /var , /home ,
170or custom partitions used to hold databases and web pages.
171Choosing the proper stripe size is also
172important.
173File systems tend to store meta-data on power-of-2 boundaries
174and you usually want to reduce seeking rather than increase seeking.
175This
176means you want to use a large off-center stripe size such as 1152 sectors
177so sequential I/O does not seek both disks and so meta-data is distributed
178across both disks rather than concentrated on a single disk.
179.Sh SYSCTL TUNING
180.Xr sysctl 8
181variables permit system behavior to be monitored and controlled at
182run-time.
183Some sysctls simply report on the behavior of the system; others allow
184the system behavior to be modified;
185some may be set at boot time using
186.Xr rc.conf 5 ,
187but most will be set via
188.Xr sysctl.conf 5 .
189There are several hundred sysctls in the system, including many that appear
190to be candidates for tuning but actually are not.
191In this document we will only cover the ones that have the greatest effect
192on the system.
193.Pp
194The
195.Va vm.overcommit
196sysctl defines the overcommit behaviour of the vm subsystem.
197The virtual memory system always does accounting of the swap space
198reservation, both total for system and per-user.
199Corresponding values
200are available through sysctl
201.Va vm.swap_total ,
202that gives the total bytes available for swapping, and
203.Va vm.swap_reserved ,
204that gives number of bytes that may be needed to back all currently
205allocated anonymous memory.
206.Pp
207Setting bit 0 of the
208.Va vm.overcommit
209sysctl causes the virtual memory system to return failure
210to the process when allocation of memory causes
211.Va vm.swap_reserved
212to exceed
213.Va vm.swap_total .
214Bit 1 of the sysctl enforces
215.Dv RLIMIT_SWAP
216limit
217(see
218.Xr getrlimit 2 ) .
219Root is exempt from this limit.
220Bit 2 allows to count most of the physical
221memory as allocatable, except wired and free reserved pages
222(accounted by
223.Va vm.stats.vm.v_free_target
224and
225.Va vm.stats.vm.v_wire_count
226sysctls, respectively).
227.Pp
228The
229.Va kern.ipc.maxpipekva
230loader tunable is used to set a hard limit on the
231amount of kernel address space allocated to mapping of pipe buffers.
232Use of the mapping allows the kernel to eliminate a copy of the
233data from writer address space into the kernel, directly copying
234the content of mapped buffer to the reader.
235Increasing this value to a higher setting, such as `25165824' might
236improve performance on systems where space for mapping pipe buffers
237is quickly exhausted.
238This exhaustion is not fatal; however, and it will only cause pipes
239to fall back to using double-copy.
240.Pp
241The
242.Va kern.ipc.shm_use_phys
243sysctl defaults to 0 (off) and may be set to 0 (off) or 1 (on).
244Setting
245this parameter to 1 will cause all System V shared memory segments to be
246mapped to unpageable physical RAM.
247This feature only has an effect if you
248are either (A) mapping small amounts of shared memory across many (hundreds)
249of processes, or (B) mapping large amounts of shared memory across any
250number of processes.
251This feature allows the kernel to remove a great deal
252of internal memory management page-tracking overhead at the cost of wiring
253the shared memory into core, making it unswappable.
254.Pp
255The
256.Va vfs.vmiodirenable
257sysctl defaults to 1 (on).
258This parameter controls how directories are cached
259by the system.
260Most directories are small and use but a single fragment
261(typically 2K) in the file system and even less (typically 512 bytes) in
262the buffer cache.
263However, when operating in the default mode the buffer
264cache will only cache a fixed number of directories even if you have a huge
265amount of memory.
266Turning on this sysctl allows the buffer cache to use
267the VM Page Cache to cache the directories.
268The advantage is that all of
269memory is now available for caching directories.
270The disadvantage is that
271the minimum in-core memory used to cache a directory is the physical page
272size (typically 4K) rather than 512 bytes.
273We recommend turning this option off in memory-constrained environments;
274however, when on, it will substantially improve the performance of services
275that manipulate a large number of files.
276Such services can include web caches, large mail systems, and news systems.
277Turning on this option will generally not reduce performance even with the
278wasted memory but you should experiment to find out.
279.Pp
280The
281.Va vfs.write_behind
282sysctl defaults to 1 (on).
283This tells the file system to issue media
284writes as full clusters are collected, which typically occurs when writing
285large sequential files.
286The idea is to avoid saturating the buffer
287cache with dirty buffers when it would not benefit I/O performance.
288However,
289this may stall processes and under certain circumstances you may wish to turn
290it off.
291.Pp
292The
293.Va vfs.hirunningspace
294sysctl determines how much outstanding write I/O may be queued to
295disk controllers system-wide at any given time.
296It is used by the UFS file system.
297The default is self-tuned and
298usually sufficient but on machines with advanced controllers and lots
299of disks this may be tuned up to match what the controllers buffer.
300Configuring this setting to match tagged queuing capabilities of
301controllers or drives with average IO size used in production works
302best (for example: 16 MiB will use 128 tags with IO requests of 128 KiB).
303Note that setting too high a value
304(exceeding the buffer cache's write threshold) can lead to extremely
305bad clustering performance.
306Do not set this value arbitrarily high!
307Higher write queuing values may also add latency to reads occurring at
308the same time.
309.Pp
310The
311.Va vfs.read_max
312sysctl governs VFS read-ahead and is expressed as the number of blocks
313to pre-read if the heuristics algorithm decides that the reads are
314issued sequentially.
315It is used by the UFS, ext2fs and msdosfs file systems.
316With the default UFS block size of 32 KiB, a setting of 64 will allow
317speculatively reading up to 2 MiB.
318This setting may be increased to get around disk I/O latencies, especially
319where these latencies are large such as in virtual machine emulated
320environments.
321It may be tuned down in specific cases where the I/O load is such that
322read-ahead adversely affects performance or where system memory is really
323low.
324.Pp
325The
326.Va vfs.ncsizefactor
327sysctl defines how large VFS namecache may grow.
328The number of currently allocated entries in namecache is provided by
329.Va debug.numcache
330sysctl and the condition
331debug.numcache < kern.maxvnodes * vfs.ncsizefactor
332is adhered to.
333.Pp
334The
335.Va vfs.ncnegfactor
336sysctl defines how many negative entries VFS namecache is allowed to create.
337The number of currently allocated negative entries is provided by
338.Va debug.numneg
339sysctl and the condition
340vfs.ncnegfactor * debug.numneg < debug.numcache
341is adhered to.
342.Pp
343There are various other buffer-cache and VM page cache related sysctls.
344We do not recommend modifying these values.
345.Pp
346The
347.Va net.inet.tcp.sendspace
348and
349.Va net.inet.tcp.recvspace
350sysctls are of particular interest if you are running network intensive
351applications.
352They control the amount of send and receive buffer space
353allowed for any given TCP connection.
354The default sending buffer is 32K; the default receiving buffer
355is 64K.
356You can often
357improve bandwidth utilization by increasing the default at the cost of
358eating up more kernel memory for each connection.
359We do not recommend
360increasing the defaults if you are serving hundreds or thousands of
361simultaneous connections because it is possible to quickly run the system
362out of memory due to stalled connections building up.
363But if you need
364high bandwidth over a fewer number of connections, especially if you have
365gigabit Ethernet, increasing these defaults can make a huge difference.
366You can adjust the buffer size for incoming and outgoing data separately.
367For example, if your machine is primarily doing web serving you may want
368to decrease the recvspace in order to be able to increase the
369sendspace without eating too much kernel memory.
370Note that the routing table (see
371.Xr route 8 )
372can be used to introduce route-specific send and receive buffer size
373defaults.
374.Pp
375As an additional management tool you can use pipes in your
376firewall rules (see
377.Xr ipfw 8 )
378to limit the bandwidth going to or from particular IP blocks or ports.
379For example, if you have a T1 you might want to limit your web traffic
380to 70% of the T1's bandwidth in order to leave the remainder available
381for mail and interactive use.
382Normally a heavily loaded web server
383will not introduce significant latencies into other services even if
384the network link is maxed out, but enforcing a limit can smooth things
385out and lead to longer term stability.
386Many people also enforce artificial
387bandwidth limitations in order to ensure that they are not charged for
388using too much bandwidth.
389.Pp
390Setting the send or receive TCP buffer to values larger than 65535 will result
391in a marginal performance improvement unless both hosts support the window
392scaling extension of the TCP protocol, which is controlled by the
393.Va net.inet.tcp.rfc1323
394sysctl.
395These extensions should be enabled and the TCP buffer size should be set
396to a value larger than 65536 in order to obtain good performance from
397certain types of network links; specifically, gigabit WAN links and
398high-latency satellite links.
399RFC1323 support is enabled by default.
400.Pp
401The
402.Va net.inet.tcp.always_keepalive
403sysctl determines whether or not the TCP implementation should attempt
404to detect dead TCP connections by intermittently delivering
405.Dq keepalives
406on the connection.
407By default, this is enabled for all applications; by setting this
408sysctl to 0, only applications that specifically request keepalives
409will use them.
410In most environments, TCP keepalives will improve the management of
411system state by expiring dead TCP connections, particularly for
412systems serving dialup users who may not always terminate individual
413TCP connections before disconnecting from the network.
414However, in some environments, temporary network outages may be
415incorrectly identified as dead sessions, resulting in unexpectedly
416terminated TCP connections.
417In such environments, setting the sysctl to 0 may reduce the occurrence of
418TCP session disconnections.
419.Pp
420The
421.Va net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack
422TCP feature is largely misunderstood.
423Historically speaking, this feature
424was designed to allow the acknowledgement to transmitted data to be returned
425along with the response.
426For example, when you type over a remote shell,
427the acknowledgement to the character you send can be returned along with the
428data representing the echo of the character.
429With delayed acks turned off,
430the acknowledgement may be sent in its own packet, before the remote service
431has a chance to echo the data it just received.
432This same concept also
433applies to any interactive protocol (e.g.,\& SMTP, WWW, POP3), and can cut the
434number of tiny packets flowing across the network in half.
435The
436.Fx
437delayed ACK implementation also follows the TCP protocol rule that
438at least every other packet be acknowledged even if the standard 40ms
439timeout has not yet passed.
440Normally the worst a delayed ACK can do is
441slightly delay the teardown of a connection, or slightly delay the ramp-up
442of a slow-start TCP connection.
443While we are not sure we believe that
444the several FAQs related to packages such as SAMBA and SQUID which advise
445turning off delayed acks may be referring to the slow-start issue.
446.Pp
447The
448.Va net.inet.ip.portrange.*
449sysctls control the port number ranges automatically bound to TCP and UDP
450sockets.
451There are three ranges: a low range, a default range, and a
452high range, selectable via the
453.Dv IP_PORTRANGE
454.Xr setsockopt 2
455call.
456Most
457network programs use the default range which is controlled by
458.Va net.inet.ip.portrange.first
459and
460.Va net.inet.ip.portrange.last ,
461which default to 49152 and 65535, respectively.
462Bound port ranges are
463used for outgoing connections, and it is possible to run the system out
464of ports under certain circumstances.
465This most commonly occurs when you are
466running a heavily loaded web proxy.
467The port range is not an issue
468when running a server which handles mainly incoming connections, such as a
469normal web server, or has a limited number of outgoing connections, such
470as a mail relay.
471For situations where you may run out of ports,
472we recommend decreasing
473.Va net.inet.ip.portrange.first
474modestly.
475A range of 10000 to 30000 ports may be reasonable.
476You should also consider firewall effects when changing the port range.
477Some firewalls
478may block large ranges of ports (usually low-numbered ports) and expect systems
479to use higher ranges of ports for outgoing connections.
480By default
481.Va net.inet.ip.portrange.last
482is set at the maximum allowable port number.
483.Pp
484The
485.Va kern.ipc.soacceptqueue
486sysctl limits the size of the listen queue for accepting new TCP connections.
487The default value of 128 is typically too low for robust handling of new
488connections in a heavily loaded web server environment.
489For such environments,
490we recommend increasing this value to 1024 or higher.
491The service daemon
492may itself limit the listen queue size (e.g.,\&
493.Xr sendmail 8 ,
494apache) but will
495often have a directive in its configuration file to adjust the queue size up.
496Larger listen queues also do a better job of fending off denial of service
497attacks.
498.Pp
499The
500.Va kern.maxfiles
501sysctl determines how many open files the system supports.
502The default is
503typically a few thousand but you may need to bump this up to ten or twenty
504thousand if you are running databases or large descriptor-heavy daemons.
505The read-only
506.Va kern.openfiles
507sysctl may be interrogated to determine the current number of open files
508on the system.
509.Pp
510The
511.Va vm.swap_idle_enabled
512sysctl is useful in large multi-user systems where you have lots of users
513entering and leaving the system and lots of idle processes.
514Such systems
515tend to generate a great deal of continuous pressure on free memory reserves.
516Turning this feature on and adjusting the swapout hysteresis (in idle
517seconds) via
518.Va vm.swap_idle_threshold1
519and
520.Va vm.swap_idle_threshold2
521allows you to depress the priority of pages associated with idle processes
522more quickly then the normal pageout algorithm.
523This gives a helping hand
524to the pageout daemon.
525Do not turn this option on unless you need it,
526because the tradeoff you are making is to essentially pre-page memory sooner
527rather than later, eating more swap and disk bandwidth.
528In a small system
529this option will have a detrimental effect but in a large system that is
530already doing moderate paging this option allows the VM system to stage
531whole processes into and out of memory more easily.
532.Sh LOADER TUNABLES
533Some aspects of the system behavior may not be tunable at runtime because
534memory allocations they perform must occur early in the boot process.
535To change loader tunables, you must set their values in
536.Xr loader.conf 5
537and reboot the system.
538.Pp
539.Va kern.maxusers
540controls the scaling of a number of static system tables, including defaults
541for the maximum number of open files, sizing of network memory resources, etc.
542.Va kern.maxusers
543is automatically sized at boot based on the amount of memory available in
544the system, and may be determined at run-time by inspecting the value of the
545read-only
546.Va kern.maxusers
547sysctl.
548.Pp
549The
550.Va kern.dfldsiz
551and
552.Va kern.dflssiz
553tunables set the default soft limits for process data and stack size
554respectively.
555Processes may increase these up to the hard limits by calling
556.Xr setrlimit 2 .
557The
558.Va kern.maxdsiz ,
559.Va kern.maxssiz ,
560and
561.Va kern.maxtsiz
562tunables set the hard limits for process data, stack, and text size
563respectively; processes may not exceed these limits.
564The
565.Va kern.sgrowsiz
566tunable controls how much the stack segment will grow when a process
567needs to allocate more stack.
568.Pp
569.Va kern.ipc.nmbclusters
570may be adjusted to increase the number of network mbufs the system is
571willing to allocate.
572Each cluster represents approximately 2K of memory,
573so a value of 1024 represents 2M of kernel memory reserved for network
574buffers.
575You can do a simple calculation to figure out how many you need.
576If you have a web server which maxes out at 1000 simultaneous connections,
577and each connection eats a 16K receive and 16K send buffer, you need
578approximately 32MB worth of network buffers to deal with it.
579A good rule of
580thumb is to multiply by 2, so 32MBx2 = 64MB/2K = 32768.
581So for this case
582you would want to set
583.Va kern.ipc.nmbclusters
584to 32768.
585We recommend values between
5861024 and 4096 for machines with moderates amount of memory, and between 4096
587and 32768 for machines with greater amounts of memory.
588Under no circumstances
589should you specify an arbitrarily high value for this parameter, it could
590lead to a boot-time crash.
591The
592.Fl m
593option to
594.Xr netstat 1
595may be used to observe network cluster use.
596.Pp
597More and more programs are using the
598.Xr sendfile 2
599system call to transmit files over the network.
600The
601.Va kern.ipc.nsfbufs
602sysctl controls the number of file system buffers
603.Xr sendfile 2
604is allowed to use to perform its work.
605This parameter nominally scales
606with
607.Va kern.maxusers
608so you should not need to modify this parameter except under extreme
609circumstances.
610See the
611.Sx TUNING
612section in the
613.Xr sendfile 2
614manual page for details.
615.Sh KERNEL CONFIG TUNING
616There are a number of kernel options that you may have to fiddle with in
617a large-scale system.
618In order to change these options you need to be
619able to compile a new kernel from source.
620The
621.Xr config 8
622manual page and the handbook are good starting points for learning how to
623do this.
624Generally the first thing you do when creating your own custom
625kernel is to strip out all the drivers and services you do not use.
626Removing things like
627.Dv INET6
628and drivers you do not have will reduce the size of your kernel, sometimes
629by a megabyte or more, leaving more memory available for applications.
630.Pp
631.Dv SCSI_DELAY
632may be used to reduce system boot times.
633The defaults are fairly high and
634can be responsible for 5+ seconds of delay in the boot process.
635Reducing
636.Dv SCSI_DELAY
637to something below 5 seconds could work (especially with modern drives).
638.Pp
639There are a number of
640.Dv *_CPU
641options that can be commented out.
642If you only want the kernel to run
643on a Pentium class CPU, you can easily remove
644.Dv I486_CPU ,
645but only remove
646.Dv I586_CPU
647if you are sure your CPU is being recognized as a Pentium II or better.
648Some clones may be recognized as a Pentium or even a 486 and not be able
649to boot without those options.
650If it works, great!
651The operating system
652will be able to better use higher-end CPU features for MMU, task switching,
653timebase, and even device operations.
654Additionally, higher-end CPUs support
6554MB MMU pages, which the kernel uses to map the kernel itself into memory,
656increasing its efficiency under heavy syscall loads.
657.Sh CPU, MEMORY, DISK, NETWORK
658The type of tuning you do depends heavily on where your system begins to
659bottleneck as load increases.
660If your system runs out of CPU (idle times
661are perpetually 0%) then you need to consider upgrading the CPU
662or perhaps you need to revisit the
663programs that are causing the load and try to optimize them.
664If your system
665is paging to swap a lot you need to consider adding more memory.
666If your
667system is saturating the disk you typically see high CPU idle times and
668total disk saturation.
669.Xr systat 1
670can be used to monitor this.
671There are many solutions to saturated disks:
672increasing memory for caching, mirroring disks, distributing operations across
673several machines, and so forth.
674.Pp
675Finally, you might run out of network suds.
676Optimize the network path
677as much as possible.
678For example, in
679.Xr firewall 7
680we describe a firewall protecting internal hosts with a topology where
681the externally visible hosts are not routed through it.
682Most bottlenecks occur at the WAN link.
683If expanding the link is not an option it may be possible to use the
684.Xr dummynet 4
685feature to implement peak shaving or other forms of traffic shaping to
686prevent the overloaded service (such as web services) from affecting other
687services (such as email), or vice versa.
688In home installations this could
689be used to give interactive traffic (your browser,
690.Xr ssh 1
691logins) priority
692over services you export from your box (web services, email).
693.Sh SEE ALSO
694.Xr netstat 1 ,
695.Xr systat 1 ,
696.Xr sendfile 2 ,
697.Xr ata 4 ,
698.Xr dummynet 4 ,
699.Xr eventtimers 4 ,
700.Xr login.conf 5 ,
701.Xr rc.conf 5 ,
702.Xr sysctl.conf 5 ,
703.Xr firewall 7 ,
704.Xr hier 7 ,
705.Xr ports 7 ,
706.Xr boot 8 ,
707.Xr bsdinstall 8 ,
708.Xr ccdconfig 8 ,
709.Xr config 8 ,
710.Xr fsck 8 ,
711.Xr gjournal 8 ,
712.Xr gpart 8 ,
713.Xr gstripe 8 ,
714.Xr gvinum 8 ,
715.Xr ifconfig 8 ,
716.Xr ipfw 8 ,
717.Xr loader 8 ,
718.Xr mount 8 ,
719.Xr newfs 8 ,
720.Xr route 8 ,
721.Xr sysctl 8 ,
722.Xr tunefs 8
723.Sh HISTORY
724The
725.Nm
726manual page was originally written by
727.An Matthew Dillon
728and first appeared
729in
730.Fx 4.3 ,
731May 2001.
732The manual page was greatly modified by
733.An Eitan Adler Aq Mt eadler@FreeBSD.org .
734