I have been trying to improve the performance of one of our servers (RH 6.2). This mostly involves fiddling with configuration parameters of the RDBMS we run and stuffing more RAM in the box.
I have also been looking at output from top and vmstat a lot. I am not sure what the difference between buff and cache is and can't seem to google or man ( I think they're verbs now) any answers. Could somebody please explain the difference? I have been reading about hdparm and tuning drive access but the recommendations I can find all relate to IDE drives. Can anyone provide or point me to tuning advice for SCSI? hdparm shows around 4MB/s buffered reads for the IDE drive and 20MB/s for each of the 3 SCSI drives. Is this good? I am still running 2.2 kernels. Does 2.4 offer the ability for disk throughput monitoring or is that only in 2.5? Because of early problems with 2.4 kernels I have never made the change. Are there still "good" and "bad" 2.4 kernels? If so, which do people recommend? Regards Steven -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
