CHAPTER 21

Performance Tuning

IN THIS CHAPTER

Storage Disk

Kernel

Apache

MySQL

References

Squeezing extra performance out of your hardware might sound like a

pointless task, given the low price of commodity upgrades today. To a certain
degree, that is true; for most of us, it is cheaper to buy a new computer than to
spend hours fighting to get a 5% speed boost. But what if the speed boost
were 20%? How about if it were 50%?

The amount of benefit you can get by optimizing your system varies
depending on what kinds of tasks you are running, but there is something for
everyone. Over the next few pages we look at quick ways to optimize the
Apache web server, both the KDE and GNOME desktop systems, both
MySQL and PostgreSQL database servers, and more.

Before we get into the details, you need to understand that optimization is not
an absolute term: If you optimize a system, you have improved its
performance, but it is still possible it could further be increased. You are
typically not interested in getting 99.999% performance out of a system
because optimization suffers from the law of diminishing returns: Some basic
changes make the biggest differences, but after that, it takes increasing
amounts of work to obtain decreasing speed improvements.

Storage Disk