Advanced tuning topics

Some advanced tuning considerations involve the storage subsystem, symmetric multithreading (SMT), I/O schedulers, and coalescing device interrupts. These topics require in-depth understanding ofLinux, Sybase IQ, or both, to determine if they are applicable to your environment.

Storage subsystem
As the size of a database grows and more users interact with it, you may need higher throughput and lower latencies from the storage subsystem in order to ensure acceptable performance.
SMT settings
Simultaneous multithreading (SMT) allows separate instruction streams, or threads, to run concurrently on the same physical processor, or core.
I/O schedulers
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP1 provides a number of I/O scheduler alternatives to optimize for different I/O usage patterns. You can use the elevator= option at boot time to set the scheduler for I/O devices or you can assign a specific I/O scheduler to individual block devices.
Coalescing device interrupts
Large database workload configurations typically use large amounts of storage. Using default driver settings for storage adapter device drivers can result in high interrupt rates. Because of frequent storage access by large workloads, the overhead of processing these interrupts can consume CPU resources that impact the performance of certain workloads.

Parent topic: Configuring Linux servers for Sybase IQ