1.\" Copyright (C) 2001 Matthew Dillon. All rights reserved. 2.\" 3.\" Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without 4.\" modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions 5.\" are met: 6.\" 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright 7.\" notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. 8.\" 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright 9.\" notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the 10.\" documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. 11.\" 12.\" THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY AUTHOR AND CONTRIBUTORS ``AS IS'' AND 13.\" ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE 14.\" IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE 15.\" ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL AUTHOR OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE 16.\" FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL 17.\" DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS 18.\" OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) 19.\" HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT 20.\" LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY 21.\" OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF 22.\" SUCH DAMAGE. 23.\" 24.\" $FreeBSD$ 25.\" 26.Dd May 9, 2016 27.Dt TUNING 7 28.Os 29.Sh NAME 30.Nm tuning 31.Nd performance tuning under FreeBSD 32.Sh SYSTEM SETUP - DISKLABEL, NEWFS, TUNEFS, SWAP 33The swap partition should typically be approximately 2x the size of 34main memory 35for systems with less than 4GB of RAM, or approximately equal to 36the size of main memory 37if you have more. 38Keep in mind future memory 39expansion when sizing the swap partition. 40Configuring too little swap can lead 41to inefficiencies in the VM page scanning code as well as create issues 42later on if you add more memory to your machine. 43On larger systems 44with multiple SCSI disks (or multiple IDE disks operating on different 45controllers), 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. 179If 180you really need to get sophisticated, we recommend using a real hardware 181RAID controller from the list of 182.Fx 183supported controllers. 184.Sh SYSCTL TUNING 185.Xr sysctl 8 186variables permit system behavior to be monitored and controlled at 187run-time. 188Some sysctls simply report on the behavior of the system; others allow 189the system behavior to be modified; 190some may be set at boot time using 191.Xr rc.conf 5 , 192but most will be set via 193.Xr sysctl.conf 5 . 194There are several hundred sysctls in the system, including many that appear 195to be candidates for tuning but actually are not. 196In this document we will only cover the ones that have the greatest effect 197on the system. 198.Pp 199The 200.Va vm.overcommit 201sysctl defines the overcommit behaviour of the vm subsystem. 202The virtual memory system always does accounting of the swap space 203reservation, both total for system and per-user. 204Corresponding values 205are available through sysctl 206.Va vm.swap_total , 207that gives the total bytes available for swapping, and 208.Va vm.swap_reserved , 209that gives number of bytes that may be needed to back all currently 210allocated anonymous memory. 211.Pp 212Setting bit 0 of the 213.Va vm.overcommit 214sysctl causes the virtual memory system to return failure 215to the process when allocation of memory causes 216.Va vm.swap_reserved 217to exceed 218.Va vm.swap_total . 219Bit 1 of the sysctl enforces 220.Dv RLIMIT_SWAP 221limit 222(see 223.Xr getrlimit 2 ) . 224Root is exempt from this limit. 225Bit 2 allows to count most of the physical 226memory as allocatable, except wired and free reserved pages 227(accounted by 228.Va vm.stats.vm.v_free_target 229and 230.Va vm.stats.vm.v_wire_count 231sysctls, respectively). 232.Pp 233The 234.Va kern.ipc.maxpipekva 235loader tunable is used to set a hard limit on the 236amount of kernel address space allocated to mapping of pipe buffers. 237Use of the mapping allows the kernel to eliminate a copy of the 238data from writer address space into the kernel, directly copying 239the content of mapped buffer to the reader. 240Increasing this value to a higher setting, such as `25165824' might 241improve performance on systems where space for mapping pipe buffers 242is quickly exhausted. 243This exhaustion is not fatal; however, and it will only cause pipes 244to fall back to using double-copy. 245.Pp 246The 247.Va kern.ipc.shm_use_phys 248sysctl defaults to 0 (off) and may be set to 0 (off) or 1 (on). 249Setting 250this parameter to 1 will cause all System V shared memory segments to be 251mapped to unpageable physical RAM. 252This feature only has an effect if you 253are either (A) mapping small amounts of shared memory across many (hundreds) 254of processes, or (B) mapping large amounts of shared memory across any 255number of processes. 256This feature allows the kernel to remove a great deal 257of internal memory management page-tracking overhead at the cost of wiring 258the shared memory into core, making it unswappable. 259.Pp 260The 261.Va vfs.vmiodirenable 262sysctl defaults to 1 (on). 263This parameter controls how directories are cached 264by the system. 265Most directories are small and use but a single fragment 266(typically 2K) in the file system and even less (typically 512 bytes) in 267the buffer cache. 268However, when operating in the default mode the buffer 269cache will only cache a fixed number of directories even if you have a huge 270amount of memory. 271Turning on this sysctl allows the buffer cache to use 272the VM Page Cache to cache the directories. 273The advantage is that all of 274memory is now available for caching directories. 275The disadvantage is that 276the minimum in-core memory used to cache a directory is the physical page 277size (typically 4K) rather than 512 bytes. 278We recommend turning this option off in memory-constrained environments; 279however, when on, it will substantially improve the performance of services 280that manipulate a large number of files. 281Such services can include web caches, large mail systems, and news systems. 282Turning on this option will generally not reduce performance even with the 283wasted memory but you should experiment to find out. 284.Pp 285The 286.Va vfs.write_behind 287sysctl defaults to 1 (on). 288This tells the file system to issue media 289writes as full clusters are collected, which typically occurs when writing 290large sequential files. 291The idea is to avoid saturating the buffer 292cache with dirty buffers when it would not benefit I/O performance. 293However, 294this may stall processes and under certain circumstances you may wish to turn 295it off. 296.Pp 297The 298.Va vfs.hirunningspace 299sysctl determines how much outstanding write I/O may be queued to 300disk controllers system-wide at any given time. 301It is used by the UFS file system. 302The default is self-tuned and 303usually sufficient but on machines with advanced controllers and lots 304of disks this may be tuned up to match what the controllers buffer. 305Configuring this setting to match tagged queuing capabilities of 306controllers or drives with average IO size used in production works 307best (for example: 16 MiB will use 128 tags with IO requests of 128 KiB). 308Note that setting too high a value 309(exceeding the buffer cache's write threshold) can lead to extremely 310bad clustering performance. 311Do not set this value arbitrarily high! 312Higher write queuing values may also add latency to reads occurring at 313the same time. 314.Pp 315The 316.Va vfs.read_max 317sysctl governs VFS read-ahead and is expressed as the number of blocks 318to pre-read if the heuristics algorithm decides that the reads are 319issued sequentially. 320It is used by the UFS, ext2fs and msdosfs file systems. 321With the default UFS block size of 32 KiB, a setting of 64 will allow 322speculatively reading up to 2 MiB. 323This setting may be increased to get around disk I/O latencies, especially 324where these latencies are large such as in virtual machine emulated 325environments. 326It may be tuned down in specific cases where the I/O load is such that 327read-ahead adversely affects performance or where system memory is really 328low. 329.Pp 330The 331.Va vfs.ncsizefactor 332sysctl defines how large VFS namecache may grow. 333The number of currently allocated entries in namecache is provided by 334.Va debug.numcache 335sysctl and the condition 336debug.numcache < kern.maxvnodes * vfs.ncsizefactor 337is adhered to. 338.Pp 339The 340.Va vfs.ncnegfactor 341sysctl defines how many negative entries VFS namecache is allowed to create. 342The number of currently allocated negative entries is provided by 343.Va debug.numneg 344sysctl and the condition 345vfs.ncnegfactor * debug.numneg < debug.numcache 346is adhered to. 347.Pp 348There are various other buffer-cache and VM page cache related sysctls. 349We do not recommend modifying these values. 350As of 351.Fx 4.3 , 352the VM system does an extremely good job tuning itself. 353.Pp 354The 355.Va net.inet.tcp.sendspace 356and 357.Va net.inet.tcp.recvspace 358sysctls are of particular interest if you are running network intensive 359applications. 360They control the amount of send and receive buffer space 361allowed for any given TCP connection. 362The default sending buffer is 32K; the default receiving buffer 363is 64K. 364You can often 365improve bandwidth utilization by increasing the default at the cost of 366eating up more kernel memory for each connection. 367We do not recommend 368increasing the defaults if you are serving hundreds or thousands of 369simultaneous connections because it is possible to quickly run the system 370out of memory due to stalled connections building up. 371But if you need 372high bandwidth over a fewer number of connections, especially if you have 373gigabit Ethernet, increasing these defaults can make a huge difference. 374You can adjust the buffer size for incoming and outgoing data separately. 375For example, if your machine is primarily doing web serving you may want 376to decrease the recvspace in order to be able to increase the 377sendspace without eating too much kernel memory. 378Note that the routing table (see 379.Xr route 8 ) 380can be used to introduce route-specific send and receive buffer size 381defaults. 382.Pp 383As an additional management tool you can use pipes in your 384firewall rules (see 385.Xr ipfw 8 ) 386to limit the bandwidth going to or from particular IP blocks or ports. 387For example, if you have a T1 you might want to limit your web traffic 388to 70% of the T1's bandwidth in order to leave the remainder available 389for mail and interactive use. 390Normally a heavily loaded web server 391will not introduce significant latencies into other services even if 392the network link is maxed out, but enforcing a limit can smooth things 393out and lead to longer term stability. 394Many people also enforce artificial 395bandwidth limitations in order to ensure that they are not charged for 396using too much bandwidth. 397.Pp 398Setting the send or receive TCP buffer to values larger than 65535 will result 399in a marginal performance improvement unless both hosts support the window 400scaling extension of the TCP protocol, which is controlled by the 401.Va net.inet.tcp.rfc1323 402sysctl. 403These extensions should be enabled and the TCP buffer size should be set 404to a value larger than 65536 in order to obtain good performance from 405certain types of network links; specifically, gigabit WAN links and 406high-latency satellite links. 407RFC1323 support is enabled by default. 408.Pp 409The 410.Va net.inet.tcp.always_keepalive 411sysctl determines whether or not the TCP implementation should attempt 412to detect dead TCP connections by intermittently delivering 413.Dq keepalives 414on the connection. 415By default, this is enabled for all applications; by setting this 416sysctl to 0, only applications that specifically request keepalives 417will use them. 418In most environments, TCP keepalives will improve the management of 419system state by expiring dead TCP connections, particularly for 420systems serving dialup users who may not always terminate individual 421TCP connections before disconnecting from the network. 422However, in some environments, temporary network outages may be 423incorrectly identified as dead sessions, resulting in unexpectedly 424terminated TCP connections. 425In such environments, setting the sysctl to 0 may reduce the occurrence of 426TCP session disconnections. 427.Pp 428The 429.Va net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack 430TCP feature is largely misunderstood. 431Historically speaking, this feature 432was designed to allow the acknowledgement to transmitted data to be returned 433along with the response. 434For example, when you type over a remote shell, 435the acknowledgement to the character you send can be returned along with the 436data representing the echo of the character. 437With delayed acks turned off, 438the acknowledgement may be sent in its own packet, before the remote service 439has a chance to echo the data it just received. 440This same concept also 441applies to any interactive protocol (e.g.,\& SMTP, WWW, POP3), and can cut the 442number of tiny packets flowing across the network in half. 443The 444.Fx 445delayed ACK implementation also follows the TCP protocol rule that 446at least every other packet be acknowledged even if the standard 100ms 447timeout has not yet passed. 448Normally the worst a delayed ACK can do is 449slightly delay the teardown of a connection, or slightly delay the ramp-up 450of a slow-start TCP connection. 451While we are not sure we believe that 452the several FAQs related to packages such as SAMBA and SQUID which advise 453turning off delayed acks may be referring to the slow-start issue. 454.Pp 455The 456.Va net.inet.ip.portrange.* 457sysctls control the port number ranges automatically bound to TCP and UDP 458sockets. 459There are three ranges: a low range, a default range, and a 460high range, selectable via the 461.Dv IP_PORTRANGE 462.Xr setsockopt 2 463call. 464Most 465network programs use the default range which is controlled by 466.Va net.inet.ip.portrange.first 467and 468.Va net.inet.ip.portrange.last , 469which default to 49152 and 65535, respectively. 470Bound port ranges are 471used for outgoing connections, and it is possible to run the system out 472of ports under certain circumstances. 473This most commonly occurs when you are 474running a heavily loaded web proxy. 475The port range is not an issue 476when running a server which handles mainly incoming connections, such as a 477normal web server, or has a limited number of outgoing connections, such 478as a mail relay. 479For situations where you may run out of ports, 480we recommend decreasing 481.Va net.inet.ip.portrange.first 482modestly. 483A range of 10000 to 30000 ports may be reasonable. 484You should also consider firewall effects when changing the port range. 485Some firewalls 486may block large ranges of ports (usually low-numbered ports) and expect systems 487to use higher ranges of ports for outgoing connections. 488By default 489.Va net.inet.ip.portrange.last 490is set at the maximum allowable port number. 491.Pp 492The 493.Va kern.ipc.somaxconn 494sysctl limits the size of the listen queue for accepting new TCP connections. 495The default value of 128 is typically too low for robust handling of new 496connections in a heavily loaded web server environment. 497For such environments, 498we recommend increasing this value to 1024 or higher. 499The service daemon 500may itself limit the listen queue size (e.g.,\& 501.Xr sendmail 8 , 502apache) but will 503often have a directive in its configuration file to adjust the queue size up. 504Larger listen queues also do a better job of fending off denial of service 505attacks. 506.Pp 507The 508.Va kern.maxfiles 509sysctl determines how many open files the system supports. 510The default is 511typically a few thousand but you may need to bump this up to ten or twenty 512thousand if you are running databases or large descriptor-heavy daemons. 513The read-only 514.Va kern.openfiles 515sysctl may be interrogated to determine the current number of open files 516on the system. 517.Pp 518The 519.Va vm.swap_idle_enabled 520sysctl is useful in large multi-user systems where you have lots of users 521entering and leaving the system and lots of idle processes. 522Such systems 523tend to generate a great deal of continuous pressure on free memory reserves. 524Turning this feature on and adjusting the swapout hysteresis (in idle 525seconds) via 526.Va vm.swap_idle_threshold1 527and 528.Va vm.swap_idle_threshold2 529allows you to depress the priority of pages associated with idle processes 530more quickly then the normal pageout algorithm. 531This gives a helping hand 532to the pageout daemon. 533Do not turn this option on unless you need it, 534because the tradeoff you are making is to essentially pre-page memory sooner 535rather than later, eating more swap and disk bandwidth. 536In a small system 537this option will have a detrimental effect but in a large system that is 538already doing moderate paging this option allows the VM system to stage 539whole processes into and out of memory more easily. 540.Sh LOADER TUNABLES 541Some aspects of the system behavior may not be tunable at runtime because 542memory allocations they perform must occur early in the boot process. 543To change loader tunables, you must set their values in 544.Xr loader.conf 5 545and reboot the system. 546.Pp 547.Va kern.maxusers 548controls the scaling of a number of static system tables, including defaults 549for the maximum number of open files, sizing of network memory resources, etc. 550As of 551.Fx 4.5 , 552.Va kern.maxusers 553is automatically sized at boot based on the amount of memory available in 554the system, and may be determined at run-time by inspecting the value of the 555read-only 556.Va kern.maxusers 557sysctl. 558Some sites will require larger or smaller values of 559.Va kern.maxusers 560and may set it as a loader tunable; values of 64, 128, and 256 are not 561uncommon. 562We do not recommend going above 256 unless you need a huge number 563of file descriptors; many of the tunable values set to their defaults by 564.Va kern.maxusers 565may be individually overridden at boot-time or run-time as described 566elsewhere in this document. 567Systems older than 568.Fx 4.4 569must set this value via the kernel 570.Xr config 8 571option 572.Cd maxusers 573instead. 574.Pp 575The 576.Va kern.dfldsiz 577and 578.Va kern.dflssiz 579tunables set the default soft limits for process data and stack size 580respectively. 581Processes may increase these up to the hard limits by calling 582.Xr setrlimit 2 . 583The 584.Va kern.maxdsiz , 585.Va kern.maxssiz , 586and 587.Va kern.maxtsiz 588tunables set the hard limits for process data, stack, and text size 589respectively; processes may not exceed these limits. 590The 591.Va kern.sgrowsiz 592tunable controls how much the stack segment will grow when a process 593needs to allocate more stack. 594.Pp 595.Va kern.ipc.nmbclusters 596may be adjusted to increase the number of network mbufs the system is 597willing to allocate. 598Each cluster represents approximately 2K of memory, 599so a value of 1024 represents 2M of kernel memory reserved for network 600buffers. 601You can do a simple calculation to figure out how many you need. 602If you have a web server which maxes out at 1000 simultaneous connections, 603and each connection eats a 16K receive and 16K send buffer, you need 604approximately 32MB worth of network buffers to deal with it. 605A good rule of 606thumb is to multiply by 2, so 32MBx2 = 64MB/2K = 32768. 607So for this case 608you would want to set 609.Va kern.ipc.nmbclusters 610to 32768. 611We recommend values between 6121024 and 4096 for machines with moderates amount of memory, and between 4096 613and 32768 for machines with greater amounts of memory. 614Under no circumstances 615should you specify an arbitrarily high value for this parameter, it could 616lead to a boot-time crash. 617The 618.Fl m 619option to 620.Xr netstat 1 621may be used to observe network cluster use. 622Older versions of 623.Fx 624do not have this tunable and require that the 625kernel 626.Xr config 8 627option 628.Dv NMBCLUSTERS 629be set instead. 630.Pp 631More and more programs are using the 632.Xr sendfile 2 633system call to transmit files over the network. 634The 635.Va kern.ipc.nsfbufs 636sysctl controls the number of file system buffers 637.Xr sendfile 2 638is allowed to use to perform its work. 639This parameter nominally scales 640with 641.Va kern.maxusers 642so you should not need to modify this parameter except under extreme 643circumstances. 644See the 645.Sx TUNING 646section in the 647.Xr sendfile 2 648manual page for details. 649.Sh KERNEL CONFIG TUNING 650There are a number of kernel options that you may have to fiddle with in 651a large-scale system. 652In order to change these options you need to be 653able to compile a new kernel from source. 654The 655.Xr config 8 656manual page and the handbook are good starting points for learning how to 657do this. 658Generally the first thing you do when creating your own custom 659kernel is to strip out all the drivers and services you do not use. 660Removing things like 661.Dv INET6 662and drivers you do not have will reduce the size of your kernel, sometimes 663by a megabyte or more, leaving more memory available for applications. 664.Pp 665.Dv SCSI_DELAY 666may be used to reduce system boot times. 667The defaults are fairly high and 668can be responsible for 5+ seconds of delay in the boot process. 669Reducing 670.Dv SCSI_DELAY 671to something below 5 seconds could work (especially with modern drives). 672.Pp 673There are a number of 674.Dv *_CPU 675options that can be commented out. 676If you only want the kernel to run 677on a Pentium class CPU, you can easily remove 678.Dv I486_CPU , 679but only remove 680.Dv I586_CPU 681if you are sure your CPU is being recognized as a Pentium II or better. 682Some clones may be recognized as a Pentium or even a 486 and not be able 683to boot without those options. 684If it works, great! 685The operating system 686will be able to better use higher-end CPU features for MMU, task switching, 687timebase, and even device operations. 688Additionally, higher-end CPUs support 6894MB MMU pages, which the kernel uses to map the kernel itself into memory, 690increasing its efficiency under heavy syscall loads. 691.Sh CPU, MEMORY, DISK, NETWORK 692The type of tuning you do depends heavily on where your system begins to 693bottleneck as load increases. 694If your system runs out of CPU (idle times 695are perpetually 0%) then you need to consider upgrading the CPU 696or perhaps you need to revisit the 697programs that are causing the load and try to optimize them. 698If your system 699is paging to swap a lot you need to consider adding more memory. 700If your 701system is saturating the disk you typically see high CPU idle times and 702total disk saturation. 703.Xr systat 1 704can be used to monitor this. 705There are many solutions to saturated disks: 706increasing memory for caching, mirroring disks, distributing operations across 707several machines, and so forth. 708If disk performance is an issue and you 709are using IDE drives, switching to SCSI can help a great deal. 710While modern 711IDE drives compare with SCSI in raw sequential bandwidth, the moment you 712start seeking around the disk SCSI drives usually win. 713.Pp 714Finally, you might run out of network suds. 715Optimize the network path 716as much as possible. 717For example, in 718.Xr firewall 7 719we describe a firewall protecting internal hosts with a topology where 720the externally visible hosts are not routed through it. 721Use 1000BaseT rather 722than 100BaseT, depending on your needs. 723Most bottlenecks occur at the WAN link (e.g.,\& 724modem, T1, DSL, whatever). 725If expanding the link is not an option it may be possible to use the 726.Xr dummynet 4 727feature to implement peak shaving or other forms of traffic shaping to 728prevent the overloaded service (such as web services) from affecting other 729services (such as email), or vice versa. 730In home installations this could 731be used to give interactive traffic (your browser, 732.Xr ssh 1 733logins) priority 734over services you export from your box (web services, email). 735.Sh SEE ALSO 736.Xr netstat 1 , 737.Xr systat 1 , 738.Xr sendfile 2 , 739.Xr ata 4 , 740.Xr eventtimers 4 , 741.Xr dummynet 4 , 742.Xr login.conf 5 , 743.Xr rc.conf 5 , 744.Xr sysctl.conf 5 , 745.Xr firewall 7 , 746.Xr hier 7 , 747.Xr ports 7 , 748.Xr boot 8 , 749.Xr bsdinstall 8 , 750.Xr ccdconfig 8 , 751.Xr config 8 , 752.Xr fsck 8 , 753.Xr gjournal 8 , 754.Xr gpart 8 , 755.Xr gstripe 8 , 756.Xr gvinum 8 , 757.Xr ifconfig 8 , 758.Xr ipfw 8 , 759.Xr loader 8 , 760.Xr mount 8 , 761.Xr newfs 8 , 762.Xr route 8 , 763.Xr sysctl 8 , 764.Xr tunefs 8 765.Sh HISTORY 766The 767.Nm 768manual page was originally written by 769.An Matthew Dillon 770and first appeared 771in 772.Fx 4.3 , 773May 2001. 774The manual page was greatly modified by 775.An Eitan Adler Aq Mt eadler@FreeBSD.org . 776