Operating System - HP-UX
1833799 Members
2883 Online
110063 Solutions
New Discussion

Re: Open discussion on HP-UX performance tuning (tips and trick)

 
Sebastien Masson
Valued Contributor

Open discussion on HP-UX performance tuning (tips and trick)

Hi all

I open this thread to let everybody discuss about performance tuning tips and trick. I know, performance tuning depend on many think but idea here is to share your

discoveries.
some undocumented performance theory.
Experience on tools you may use, try, recommend, etc.
how do you analyze performance of your application stack.
Some good relevant documentation.

With the complexity of actual system, performance tuning is not an easy task at all.

Like someone said, ???Expert is on who learns more and more about less and less.???

Thanks

Sabey
18 REPLIES 18
Pete Randall
Outstanding Contributor

Re: Open discussion on HP-UX performance tuning (tips and trick)

Sabey,

First rule: Get Glance. Use it. Become familiar with what your baseline is under normal operation so you can tell where the anomalies are when the system is under duress.


Pete

Pete
Ian Dennison_1
Honored Contributor

Re: Open discussion on HP-UX performance tuning (tips and trick)

First rule of performance tuning,...

There is no "one magic document" that will tell you how to diagnose or tune for performance.

Second rule of performance tuning,...

Variable loadings on systems can make proving performance gains difficult, if not impossible.

Third rule of performance tuning,...

If it aint broke, don't try to fix it!

Fourth rule of performance tuning,...

Always insist on the User describing the symptoms and the facts only; opinions only clutter the issue.

Share and Enjoy! Ian
Building a dumber user
John Payne_2
Honored Contributor

Re: Open discussion on HP-UX performance tuning (tips and trick)

Second Rule: There is no way to stress too much what Pete has suggested. You could say it until you are blue in the face and still be ok.

Third Rule: A reboot is not a panacea. Most often all a reboot does is hide the true problem until later. That's good if your are overwhelmingly busy at the moment and can afford another outage, but you should always try to get the real cause evaluated if you can.

Hope it helps

John
Spoon!!!!
Vicente Sanchez_3
Respected Contributor

Re: Open discussion on HP-UX performance tuning (tips and trick)

Hello,

A not new rule:

- Use this forum as much a you need. The level of knowledge of people is really fantastic and can help very much.

Regards, Vicente.
John Bolene
Honored Contributor

Re: Open discussion on HP-UX performance tuning (tips and trick)

turn on that pseudo swap in the kernel by using swapmem_on 1

get glance and use it or at least use top and sar to find out what is going on

my term on expert is one who knows what he does not know and does not try to tell anyone about what he does not know
It is always a good day when you are launching rockets! http://tripolioklahoma.org, Mostly Missiles http://mostlymissiles.com
Elena Leontieva
Esteemed Contributor

Re: Open discussion on HP-UX performance tuning (tips and trick)

I found the "Introduction to performance tuning for HP-UX" docID:UPERFKBAN00000726 very concise and helpful.
Caesar_3
Esteemed Contributor

Re: Open discussion on HP-UX performance tuning (tips and trick)

Hello!

For best preformance know your system,
know her adventeges and disadvanges,
always expore your system.

Love what you do.

Use all what your system giving you.
Even the smolest tool can show you a way
to better preformance.

The ps, vmstat, sar, top, dmesg, glance and
more will help to do the best for system.

Caesar
Paula J Frazer-Campbell
Honored Contributor

Re: Open discussion on HP-UX performance tuning (tips and trick)

Hi

As well as the above I normally log in as a normal user and carry out a few tasks so that I know the "Feel" of my system.

So when a user reports - "Its running slow" I then can compare what they are complaining about with my experiance as a normal user.

HTH

Paula
If you can spell SysAdmin then you is one - anon
Michael Elleby III_1
Trusted Contributor

Re: Open discussion on HP-UX performance tuning (tips and trick)

Hmmm,

1. Use Glance, it will be well worth the investment, and in particular, if you got applications sitting on top of an Oracle Database, View the System Tables Report frequently, as it 'keeps an eye' on some of the major kernel parameters that Oracle DBA's ask you to change.. i.e. semmni, msgmni..

2. HP's software recovery handbook on the ITRC.. If you need to get some understanding in a relatively short amount of time, this documentation is valuable..

3. Use TUSC to pinpoint issues with an application that a programmer doesn't seem to think when it starting choking (Even if he/she hasn't heard of dynamic memory allocation)

Mike-
Knowledge Is Power
Steven E. Protter
Exalted Contributor

Re: Open discussion on HP-UX performance tuning (tips and trick)

A lot of real performance tuning happens after collecting various sar output. The best way to identify a problem is to collect sar output and analyze the data.

I'm attaching some scripts that I often post. They have gotten me through many issues without the cost of gui glance. We have a license for glance but just keep it running in operations so they can see a red spike and call me if they aren't too busy to notice.

SEP
Steven E Protter
Owner of ISN Corporation
http://isnamerica.com
http://hpuxconsulting.com
Sponsor: http://hpux.ws
Twitter: http://twitter.com/hpuxlinux
Founder http://newdatacloud.com
Bill Hassell
Honored Contributor

Re: Open discussion on HP-UX performance tuning (tips and trick)

Another useful tool is SarCheck. Unlike Glance, it looks at performance metrics and with an extensive set of rules, provides guidelines and recommendations. Unix tools are useful but require extensive work and interpretation to determine what might be changed. This is where SarCheck save a lot of time. (http://www.sarcheck.com/)


Bill Hassell, sysadmin
Sridhar Bhaskarla
Honored Contributor

Re: Open discussion on HP-UX performance tuning (tips and trick)

Hi Sabey,

Whenever I logon to a system, the first thing I do is to look at %sys and %wio of "sar 5 12". High rates of them may be indication of resource constraints and I start from there.

-Sri
You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don't try
Khalid A. Al-Tayaran
Valued Contributor

Re: Open discussion on HP-UX performance tuning (tips and trick)

Khalid A. Al-Tayaran
Valued Contributor

Re: Open discussion on HP-UX performance tuning (tips and trick)


Read the attached file, for performance with glance...
Tim D Fulford
Honored Contributor

Re: Open discussion on HP-UX performance tuning (tips and trick)

Hi

I like glance, but MUCH prefer MeasureWare, not because it is better, but because you get the history of a problem/system. Similar to some of the comments above about getting used to what a system "usually" does, MeasureWare does this very quickly. I usually use the global class & extract CPU%, sys CPU% and peak disk util%. Also I plot out al the queues. Very quicly you can see what the system does over say 24 hours.

The next step I like to define application groups, for this you really have to have a relatively good knowledge of what runs as what & by whom. It may take a few itterations but when the application groups are sorted, again you can see what does what.

Lastly, this may be the hardest for some systems, you need an application "load indicator", and or an application "backlog indicator". This may be impossible to agree on some systems, but I have found that usually there is one or two overriding loading things. What I measure is
o Insert rate into a key table (simply the max unique index number)
o The number of files backlogged (ls | wc -l)
o The number of requests/s (our application provides this figure, OR there may be a key table which you can look at isam reads etc)
o The number of items processed. (aplication provides this)
o Or anything else that may be useful, say number of users...

After this the KEY is to plot say cpu Vs load. The main idea is to get a load response graph. I have been lucky as all the systems I have done this on had one overriding loading factor, thus I only needed ONE item per system.

After the above three steps (about 3-18 month work depending on how easy it is to implement things on your systems). I've used the above to
o Data to allow us to capacitise future systems
o Problem solve and analyse
o benchmark systems before & after changes to ensure performance is OK/better
o As nice colourfull graphs for management, as proof that I do do a job and dont just guess....

Regards

Tim
-
Khalid A. Al-Tayaran
Valued Contributor

Re: Open discussion on HP-UX performance tuning (tips and trick)


Hi,

Sorry... the prev. one was not for glance...


Also read this one...
Tim D Fulford
Honored Contributor

Re: Open discussion on HP-UX performance tuning (tips and trick)

here is a thread with some of my tools I mentioned above for measureWare

http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0x612063f96280d711abdc0090277a778c,00.html

Tim
-
Con O'Kelly
Honored Contributor

Re: Open discussion on HP-UX performance tuning (tips and trick)

Hi
I've found the HP-UX Performance Cookbook paper written by Stephen Ciullo and Doug Grumann (HP experts in Performance Tuning) to be an excellent read, with plenty of good straight forward advice.
I have attached a copy here, though its available at www.docs.hp.com

Cheers
Con