Tikam

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8
Monitoring and managing system status and

performance
Optimizing system throughput, latency, and power consumption
Last Updated: 2019-09-20

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Monitoring and managing system status and
performance
Optimizing system throughput, latency, and power consumption
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Abstract
This documentation collection provides instructions on how to monitor and optimize the
throughput, latency, and power consumption of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 in different scenarios.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
. . . . . . . . . . . . . FEEDBACK
PROVIDING . . . . . . . . . . . . ON
. . . .RED
. . . . .HAT
. . . . .DOCUMENTATION
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6. . . . . . . . . . . . .
.CHAPTER
. . . . . . . . . . 1.. .GETTING
. . . . . . . . . . STARTED
. . . . . . . . . . .WITH
. . . . . .TUNED
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7. . . . . . . . . . . . .
1.1. THE PURPOSE OF TUNED 7
1.2. TUNED PROFILES 7
The default profile 7
Merged profiles 8
The location of profiles 8
The syntax of profile configuration 9
Additional resources 9
1.3. TUNED PROFILES DISTRIBUTED WITH RHEL 9
Real-time profiles 10
1.4. STATIC AND DYNAMIC TUNING IN TUNED 11
1.5. TUNED NO-DAEMON MODE 11
1.6. INSTALLING AND ENABLING TUNED 12
Procedure 12
1.7. LISTING AVAILABLE TUNED PROFILES 12
Procedure 12
1.8. SETTING A TUNED PROFILE 13
Prerequisites 13
Procedure 13
1.9. DISABLING TUNED 14
Procedure 14
1.10. RELATED INFORMATION 14
. . . . . . . . . . . 2.
CHAPTER . . CUSTOMIZING
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . TUNED
. . . . . . . . PROFILES
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
..............
2.1. PREREQUISITES 15
2.2. TUNED PROFILES 15
The default profile 15
Merged profiles 15
The location of profiles 16
The syntax of profile configuration 16
2.3. INHERITANCE BETWEEN TUNED PROFILES 16
2.4. STATIC AND DYNAMIC TUNING IN TUNED 17
2.5. TUNED PLUG-INS 18
Monitoring plug-ins 18
Tuning plug-ins 18
Syntax for plug-ins in Tuned profiles 18
Short plug-in syntax 19
Conflicting plug-in definitions in a profile 19
Functionality not implemented in any plug-in 20
2.6. AVAILABLE TUNED PLUG-INS 20
Monitoring plug-ins 20
Tuning plug-ins 20
2.7. VARIABLES AND BUILT-IN FUNCTIONS IN TUNED PROFILES 23
1
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Monitoring and managing system status and performance
Variables 24
Functions 24
2.8. BUILT-IN FUNCTIONS AVAILABLE IN TUNED PROFILES 25
2.9. CREATING NEW TUNED PROFILES 26
Prerequisites 26
Procedure 26
2.10. MODIFYING EXISTING TUNED PROFILES 27
Prerequisites 27
Procedure 27
2.11. SETTING THE DISK SCHEDULER USING TUNED 28
Prerequisites 28
Procedure 28
2.12. RELATED INFORMATION 29
.CHAPTER
. . . . . . . . . . 3.
. . USING
. . . . . . . .THE
. . . . .WEB
. . . . .CONSOLE
. . . . . . . . . . . FOR
. . . . . SELECTING
. . . . . . . . . . . . .PERFORMANCE
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .PROFILES
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .30
..............
Prerequisites 30
Procedure 30
. . . . . . . . . . . 4.
CHAPTER . . .SETTING
. . . . . . . . . THE
. . . . . DISK
. . . . . .SCHEDULER
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .32
..............
4.1. DISK SCHEDULER CHANGES IN RHEL 8 32
4.2. AVAILABLE DISK SCHEDULERS 32
4.3. RECOMMENDED DISK SCHEDULERS FOR DIFFERENT USE CASES 33
4.4. THE DEFAULT DISK SCHEDULER 33
4.5. DETERMINING THE ACTIVE DISK SCHEDULER 33
Procedure 33
4.6. SETTING THE DISK SCHEDULER USING TUNED 33
Prerequisites 34
Procedure 34
4.7. SETTING THE DISK SCHEDULER USING UDEV RULES 35
Procedure 35
4.8. TEMPORARILY SETTING A SCHEDULER FOR A SPECIFIC DISK 36
. . . . . . . . . . . 5.
CHAPTER . . TUNING
. . . . . . . . . THE
. . . . . PERFORMANCE
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . OF
. . . .A. .SAMBA
. . . . . . . .SERVER
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .37
..............
Prerequisites 37
5.1. SETTING THE SMB PROTOCOL VERSION 37
Procedure 37
5.2. TUNING SHARES WITH DIRECTORIES THAT CONTAIN A LARGE NUMBER OF FILES 37
Prerequisites 37
Procedure 37
5.3. SETTINGS THAT CAN HAVE A NEGATIVE PERFORMANCE IMPACT 38
.CHAPTER
. . . . . . . . . . 6.
. . .OPTIMIZING
. . . . . . . . . . . . .VIRTUAL
. . . . . . . . . .MACHINE
. . . . . . . . . . PERFORMANCE
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . IN
. . .RHEL
. . . . . . 8. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .39
..............
6.1. WHAT INFLUENCES VIRTUAL MACHINE PERFORMANCE 39
6.2. OPTIMIZING VIRTUAL MACHINE PERFORMANCE USING TUNED 39
Prerequisites 40
Procedure 40
6.3. OPTIMIZING VIRTUAL MACHINE I/O PERFORMANCE 40
2
Table of Contents
6.3.1. Tuning block I/O in virtual machines 41

Procedure 41
6.3.2. Disk I/O throttling in virtual machines 41
Procedure 41
Additional information 42
6.3.3. Enabling multi-queue virtio-scsi 42
Procedure 42
6.4. OPTIMIZING VIRTUAL MACHINE CPU PERFORMANCE 42
6.4.1. Configuring NUMA in a virtual machine 43
Prerequisites 43
Procedure 43
Automatic methods 43
Manual methods 43
6.4.2. Sample vCPU performance tuning scenario 44
Starting scenario 44
Solution 45
6.5. OPTIMIZING VIRTUAL MACHINE NETWORK PERFORMANCE 49
Procedure 49
6.6. VIRTUAL MACHINE PERFORMANCE MONITORING TOOLS 51
Default OS performance monitoring tools 51
perf kvm 51
numastat 52
. . . . . . . . . . . 7.
CHAPTER . . MANAGING
. . . . . . . . . . . . .POWER
. . . . . . . . .CONSUMPTION
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . WITH
. . . . . . POWERTOP
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .54
..............
7.1. THE PURPOSE OF POWERTOP 54
7.2. USING POWERTOP 54
7.2.1. Prerequisites 54
7.2.2. Starting PowerTOP 54
Procedure 54
7.2.3. Calibrating PowerTOP 54
Procedure 54
7.2.4. Setting the measuring interval 55
Procedure 55
7.2.5. Related information 55
7.3. POWERTOP STATISTICS 55
7.3.1. The Overview tab 55
7.3.2. The Idle stats tab 56
7.3.3. The Device stats tab 56
7.3.4. The Tunables tab 56
7.4. GENERATING AN HTML OUTPUT 57
Procedure 57
7.5. OPTIMIZING POWER CONSUMPTION 57
7.5.1. Optimizing power consumption using the powertop service 57
Procedure 57
7.5.2. The powertop2tuned utility 57
7.5.3. Optimizing power consumption using the powertop2tuned utility 57
Prerequisites 57
Procedure 58
Additional information 58
3
7.5.4. Comparison of powertop.service and powertop2tuned 58
4
Table of Contents
5
PROVIDING FEEDBACK ON RED HAT DOCUMENTATION

We appreciate your input on our documentation. Please let us know how we could make it better. To do
so:
For simple comments on specific passages, make sure you are viewing the documentation in the
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3. Fill in the Description field with your suggestion for improvement. Include a link to the
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4. Click Submit Bug.
6
CHAPTER 1. GETTING STARTED WITH TUNED

As a system administrator, you can use the Tuned application to optimize the performance profile of
your system for a variety of use cases.
1.1. THE PURPOSE OF TUNED

Tuned is a service that monitors your system and optimizes the performance under certain workloads.
The core of Tuned are profiles, which tune your system for different use cases.
Tuned is distributed with a number of predefined profiles for use cases such as:
High throughput
Low latency
Saving power
It is possible to modify the rules defined for each profile and customize how to tune a particular device.
When you switch to another profile or deactivate Tuned, all changes made to the system settings by the
previous profile revert back to their original state.
You can also configure Tuned to react to changes in device usage and adjusts settings to improve
performance of active devices and reduce power consumption of inactive devices.
1.2. TUNED PROFILES

A detailed analysis of a system can be very time-consuming. Tuned provides a number of predefined
profiles for typical use cases. You can also create, modify, and delete profiles.
The profiles provided with Tuned are divided into the following categories:
Power-saving profiles
Performance-boosting profiles
The performance-boosting profiles include profiles that focus on the following aspects:
Low latency for storage and network
High throughput for storage and network
Virtual machine performance
Virtualization host performance
The default profile

During the installation, the best profile for your system is selected automatically. Currently, the default
profile is selected according to the following customizable rules:
Environment Default profile Goal
Compute nodes throughput-performance The best throughput performance
7
Virtual machines virtual-guest The best performance. If you are not

interested in the best performance, you can
change it to the balanced or powersave
profile.
Other cases balanced Balanced performance and power

consumption
Merged profiles
As an experimental feature, it is possible to select more profiles at once. Tuned will try to merge them
during the load.
If there are conflicts, the settings from the last specified profile takes precedence.
Example 1.1. Low power consumption in a virtual guest
The following example optimizes the system to run in a virtual machine for the best performance and
concurrently tunes it for low power consumption, while the low power consumption is the priority:
# tuned-adm profile virtual-guest powersave

WARNING
Merging is done automatically without checking whether the resulting combination

of parameters makes sense. Consequently, the feature might tune some
parameters the opposite way, which might be counterproductive: for example,
setting the disk for high throughput by using the throughput-performance profile
and concurrently setting the disk spindown to the low value by the spindown-disk
profile.
The location of profiles

Tuned stores profiles in the following directories:
/usr/lib/tuned/
Distribution-specific profiles are stored in the directory. Each profile has its own directory. The profile
consists of the main configuration file called tuned.conf, and optionally other files, for example
helper scripts.
/etc/tuned/
If you need to customize a profile, copy the profile directory into the directory, which is used for
custom profiles. If there are two profiles of the same name, the custom profile located in /etc/tuned/
is used.
8
The syntax of profile configuration

The tuned.conf file can contain one [main] section and other sections for configuring plug-in instances.
However, all sections are optional.
Lines starting with the hash sign (#) are comments.
Additional resources
The tuned.conf(5) man page.
1.3. TUNED PROFILES DISTRIBUTED WITH RHEL

The following is a list of profiles that are installed with Tuned on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
NOTE
There might be more product-specific or third-party Tuned profiles available. Such

profiles are usually provided by separate RPM packages.
balanced
The default power-saving profile. It is intended to be a compromise between performance and power
consumption. It uses auto-scaling and auto-tuning whenever possible. The only drawback is the
increased latency. In the current Tuned release, it enables the CPU, disk, audio, and video plugins,
and activates the conservative CPU governor. The radeon_powersave option uses the dpm-
balanced value if it is supported, otherwise it is set to auto.
powersave
A profile for maximum power saving performance. It can throttle the performance in order to
minimize the actual power consumption. In the current Tuned release it enables USB autosuspend,
WiFi power saving, and Aggressive Link Power Management (ALPM) power savings for SATA host
adapters. It also schedules multi-core power savings for systems with a low wakeup rate and
activates the ondemand governor. It enables AC97 audio power saving or, depending on your
system, HDA-Intel power savings with a 10 seconds timeout. If your system contains a supported
Radeon graphics card with enabled KMS, the profile configures it to automatic power saving. On
ASUS Eee PCs, a dynamic Super Hybrid Engine is enabled.
NOTE
In certain cases, the balanced profile is more efficient compared to the powersave
profile.
Consider there is a defined amount of work that needs to be done, for example a video
file that needs to be transcoded. Your machine might consume less energy if the
transcoding is done on the full power, because the task is finished quickly, the
machine starts to idle, and it can automatically step-down to very efficient power save
modes. On the other hand, if you transcode the file with a throttled machine, the
machine consumes less power during the transcoding, but the process takes longer
and the overall consumed energy can be higher.
That is why the balanced profile can be generally a better option.
throughput-performance
A server profile optimized for high throughput. It disables power savings mechanisms and enables
9
A server profile optimized for high throughput. It disables power savings mechanisms and enables
sysctl settings that improve the throughput performance of the disk and network IO. CPU governor
is set to performance.
latency-performance
A server profile optimized for low latency. It disables power savings mechanisms and enables sysctl
settings that improve latency. CPU governor is set to performance and the CPU is locked to the low
C states (by PM QoS).
network-latency
A profile for low latency network tuning. It is based on the latency-performance profile. It
additionally disables transparent huge pages and NUMA balancing, and tunes several other network-
related sysctl parameters.
network-throughput
A profile for throughput network tuning. It is based on the throughput-performance profile. It
additionally increases kernel network buffers.
virtual-guest
A profile designed for virtual guests based on the throughput-performance profile that, among
other tasks, decreases virtual memory swappiness and increases disk readahead values. It does not
disable disk barriers.
virtual-host
A profile designed for virtual hosts based on the throughput-performance profile that, among other
tasks, decreases virtual memory swappiness, increases disk readahead values, and enables a more
aggressive value of dirty pages writeback.
oracle
A profile optimized for Oracle databases loads based on throughput-performance profile. It
additionally disables transparent huge pages and modifies other performance-related kernel
parameters. This profile is provided by the tuned-profiles-oracle package.
desktop
A profile optimized for desktops, based on the balanced profile. It additionally enables scheduler
autogroups for better response of interactive applications.
Real-time profiles
Real-time profiles are intended for systems running the real-time kernel. Without a special kernel build,
they do not configure the system to be real-time. On RHEL, the profiles are available from additional
repositories.
The following real-time profiles are available:
realtime
Use on bare-metal real-time systems.
Provided by the tuned-profiles-realtime package, which is available from the RT or NFV repositories.
realtime-virtual-host
Use in a virtualization host configured for real-time.
Provided by the tuned-profiles-nfv-host package, which is available from the NFV repository.
realtime-virtual-guest
Use in a virtualization guest configured for real-time.
Provided by the tuned-profiles-nfv-guest package, which is available from the NFV repository.
10
1.4. STATIC AND DYNAMIC TUNING IN TUNED

This section explains the difference between the two categories of system tuning that Tuned applies:
static and dynamic.
Static tuning
Mainly consists of the application of predefined sysctl and sysfs settings and one-shot activation of
several configuration tools such as ethtool.
Dynamic tuning
Watches how various system components are used throughout the uptime of your system. Tuned
adjusts system settings dynamically based on that monitoring information.
For example, the hard drive is used heavily during startup and login, but is barely used later when the
user might mainly work with applications such as web browsers or email clients. Similarly, the CPU
and network devices are used differently at different times. Tuned monitors the activity of these
components and reacts to the changes in their use.
By default, dynamic tuning is disabled. To enable it, edit the /etc/tuned/tuned-main.conf file and
change the dynamic_tuning option to 1. Tuned then periodically analyzes system statistics and uses
them to update your system tuning settings. To configure the time interval in seconds between
these updates, use the update_interval option.
Currently implemented dynamic tuning algorithms try to balance the performance and powersave,
and are therefore disabled in the performance profiles. Dynamic tuning for individual plug-ins can be
enabled or disabled in the Tuned profiles.
Example 1.2. Static and dynamic tuning on a workstation
On a typical office workstation, the Ethernet network interface is inactive most of the time. Only a
few emails go in and out or some web pages might be loaded.
For those kinds of loads, the network interface does not have to run at full speed all the time, as it
does by default. Tuned has a monitoring and tuning plug-in for network devices that can detect this
low activity and then automatically lower the speed of that interface, typically resulting in a lower
power usage.
If the activity on the interface increases for a longer period of time, for example because a DVD
image is being downloaded or an email with a large attachment is opened, Tuned detects this and
sets the interface speed to maximum to offer the best performance while the activity level is high.
This principle is used for other plug-ins for CPU and disks as well.
1.5. TUNED NO-DAEMON MODE

You can run Tuned in no-daemon mode, which does not require any resident memory. In this mode,
Tuned applies the settings and exits.
By default, no-daemon mode is disabled because a lot of Tuned functionality is missing in this mode,
including:
D-Bus support
Hot-plug support
11
Rollback support for settings
To enable no-daemon mode, include the following line in the /etc/tuned/tuned-main.conf file:
daemon = 0
1.6. INSTALLING AND ENABLING TUNED

This procedure installs and enables the Tuned application, installs Tuned profiles, and presets a default
Tuned profile for your system.
Procedure
1. Install the tuned package:
# yum install tuned
2. Enable and start the tuned service:
# systemctl enable --now tuned
3. Optionally, install Tuned profiles for real-time systems:
# yum install tuned-profiles-realtime tuned-profiles-nfv
4. Verify that a Tuned profile is active and applied:
$ tuned-adm active
Current active profile: balanced
$ tuned-adm verify
Verfication succeeded, current system settings match the preset profile.

See tuned log file ('/var/log/tuned/tuned.log') for details.
1.7. LISTING AVAILABLE TUNED PROFILES

This procedure lists all Tuned profiles that are currently available on your system.
Procedure
To list all available Tuned profiles on your system, use:
$ tuned-adm list
Available profiles:
- balanced - General non-specialized tuned profile
- desktop - Optimize for the desktop use-case
- latency-performance - Optimize for deterministic performance at the cost of increased
power consumption
- network-latency - Optimize for deterministic performance at the cost of increased power
12
consumption, focused on low latency network performance

- network-throughput - Optimize for streaming network throughput, generally only
necessary on older CPUs or 40G+ networks
- powersave - Optimize for low power consumption
- throughput-performance - Broadly applicable tuning that provides excellent performance
across a variety of common server workloads
- virtual-guest - Optimize for running inside a virtual guest
- virtual-host - Optimize for running KVM guests
To display only the currently active profile, use:
$ tuned-adm active
The tuned-adm(8) man page.
1.8. SETTING A TUNED PROFILE

This procedure activates a selected Tuned profile on your system.
Prerequisites
The tuned service is running. See Section 1.6, “Installing and enabling Tuned” for details.
Procedure
1. Optionally, you can let Tuned recommend the most suitable profile for your system:
# tuned-adm recommend
balanced
2. Activate a profile:
# tuned-adm profile selected-profile
Alternatively, you can activate a combination of multiple profiles:
# tuned-adm profile profile1 profile2
Example 1.3. A virtual machine optimized for low power consumption
The following example optimizes the system to run in a virtual machine with the best
performance and concurrently tunes it for low power consumption, while the low power
consumption is the priority:
13
3. Verify that the Tuned profile is active and applied:
$ tuned-adm active
Current active profile: selected-profile
$ tuned-adm verify

The tuned-adm(8) man page
1.9. DISABLING TUNED

This procedure disables Tuned and resets all affected system settings to their original state before
Tuned modified them.
Procedure
To disable all tunings temporarily:
# tuned-adm off
The tunings are applied again after the tuned service restarts.
Alternatively, to stop and disable the tuned service permanently:
# systemctl disable --now tuned
The tuned-adm(8) man page.
1.10. RELATED INFORMATION

The tuned(8) man page
The tuned-adm(8) man page
The Tuned project website: https://tuned-project.org/
14
CHAPTER 2. CUSTOMIZING TUNED PROFILES

You can create or modify Tuned profiles to optimize system performance for your intended use case.
2.1. PREREQUISITES
Install and enable Tuned as described in Section 1.6, “Installing and enabling Tuned” .
2.2. TUNED PROFILES

A detailed analysis of a system can be very time-consuming. Tuned provides a number of predefined
profiles for typical use cases. You can also create, modify, and delete profiles.
The profiles provided with Tuned are divided into the following categories:
Power-saving profiles
Performance-boosting profiles
The performance-boosting profiles include profiles that focus on the following aspects:
Low latency for storage and network
High throughput for storage and network
Virtual machine performance
Virtualization host performance
The default profile

During the installation, the best profile for your system is selected automatically. Currently, the default
profile is selected according to the following customizable rules:
Compute nodes throughput-performance The best throughput performance
Virtual machines virtual-guest The best performance. If you are not

interested in the best performance, you can
change it to the balanced or powersave
profile.
Other cases balanced Balanced performance and power

consumption
Merged profiles
As an experimental feature, it is possible to select more profiles at once. Tuned will try to merge them
during the load.
If there are conflicts, the settings from the last specified profile takes precedence.
Example 2.1. Low power consumption in a virtual guest
15
The following example optimizes the system to run in a virtual machine for the best performance and
concurrently tunes it for low power consumption, while the low power consumption is the priority:

WARNING
Merging is done automatically without checking whether the resulting combination

of parameters makes sense. Consequently, the feature might tune some
parameters the opposite way, which might be counterproductive: for example,
setting the disk for high throughput by using the throughput-performance profile
and concurrently setting the disk spindown to the low value by the spindown-disk
profile.
The location of profiles

Tuned stores profiles in the following directories:
/usr/lib/tuned/
Distribution-specific profiles are stored in the directory. Each profile has its own directory. The profile
consists of the main configuration file called tuned.conf, and optionally other files, for example
helper scripts.
/etc/tuned/
If you need to customize a profile, copy the profile directory into the directory, which is used for
custom profiles. If there are two profiles of the same name, the custom profile located in /etc/tuned/
is used.
The syntax of profile configuration

The tuned.conf file can contain one [main] section and other sections for configuring plug-in instances.
However, all sections are optional.
Lines starting with the hash sign (#) are comments.
The tuned.conf(5) man page.
2.3. INHERITANCE BETWEEN TUNED PROFILES

Tuned profiles can be based on other profiles and modify only certain aspects of their parent profile.
The [main] section of Tuned profiles recognizes the include option:
[main]
include=parent
All settings from the parent profile are loaded in this child profile. In the following sections, the child
16
All settings from the parent profile are loaded in this child profile. In the following sections, the child
profile can override certain settings inherited from the parent profile or add new settings not present in
the parent profile.
You can create your own child profile in the /etc/tuned/ directory based on a pre-installed profile in
/usr/lib/tuned/ with only some parameters adjusted.
If the parent profile is updated, such as after a Tuned upgrade, the changes are reflected in the child
profile.
Example 2.2. A power-saving profile based on balanced
The following is an example of a custom profile that extends the balanced profile and sets
Aggressive Link Power Management (ALPM) for all devices to the maximum powersaving.
[main]
include=balanced
[scsi_host]
alpm=min_power
The tuned.conf(5) man page
2.4. STATIC AND DYNAMIC TUNING IN TUNED

This section explains the difference between the two categories of system tuning that Tuned applies:
static and dynamic.
Static tuning
Mainly consists of the application of predefined sysctl and sysfs settings and one-shot activation of
several configuration tools such as ethtool.
Dynamic tuning
Watches how various system components are used throughout the uptime of your system. Tuned
adjusts system settings dynamically based on that monitoring information.
For example, the hard drive is used heavily during startup and login, but is barely used later when the
user might mainly work with applications such as web browsers or email clients. Similarly, the CPU
and network devices are used differently at different times. Tuned monitors the activity of these
components and reacts to the changes in their use.
By default, dynamic tuning is disabled. To enable it, edit the /etc/tuned/tuned-main.conf file and
change the dynamic_tuning option to 1. Tuned then periodically analyzes system statistics and uses
them to update your system tuning settings. To configure the time interval in seconds between
these updates, use the update_interval option.
Currently implemented dynamic tuning algorithms try to balance the performance and powersave,
and are therefore disabled in the performance profiles. Dynamic tuning for individual plug-ins can be
enabled or disabled in the Tuned profiles.
Example 2.3. Static and dynamic tuning on a workstation
17
few emails go in and out or some web pages might be loaded.
For those kinds of loads, the network interface does not have to run at full speed all the time, as it
does by default. Tuned has a monitoring and tuning plug-in for network devices that can detect this
low activity and then automatically lower the speed of that interface, typically resulting in a lower
power usage.
If the activity on the interface increases for a longer period of time, for example because a DVD
image is being downloaded or an email with a large attachment is opened, Tuned detects this and
sets the interface speed to maximum to offer the best performance while the activity level is high.
This principle is used for other plug-ins for CPU and disks as well.
2.5. TUNED PLUG-INS

Plug-ins are modules in Tuned profiles that Tuned uses to monitor or optimize different devices on the
system.
Tuned uses two types of plug-ins:
monitoring plug-ins
tuning plug-ins
Monitoring plug-ins
Monitoring plug-ins are used to get information from a running system. The output of the monitoring
plug-ins can be used by tuning plug-ins for dynamic tuning.
Monitoring plug-ins are automatically instantiated whenever their metrics are needed by any of the
enabled tuning plug-ins. If two tuning plug-ins require the same data, only one instance of the
monitoring plug-in is created and the data is shared.
Tuning plug-ins
Each tuning plug-in tunes an individual subsystem and takes several parameters that are populated
from the tuned profiles. Each subsystem can have multiple devices, such as multiple CPUs or network
cards, that are handled by individual instances of the tuning plug-ins. Specific settings for individual
devices are also supported.
Syntax for plug-ins in Tuned profiles

Sections describing plug-in instances are formatted in the following way:
[NAME]
type=TYPE
devices=DEVICES
NAME
is the name of the plug-in instance as it is used in the logs. It can be an arbitrary string.
TYPE
is the type of the tuning plug-in.
DEVICES
is the list of devices that this plug-in instance handles.
The devices line can contain a list, a wildcard ( *), and negation (!). If there is no devices line, all
18
The devices line can contain a list, a wildcard ( *), and negation (!). If there is no devices line, all
devices present or later attached on the system of the TYPE are handled by the plug-in instance.
This is same as using the devices=* option.
Example 2.4. Matching block devices with a plug-in
The following example matches all block devices starting with sd, such as sda or sdb, and does
not disable barriers on them:
[data_disk]
type=disk
devices=sd*
disable_barriers=false
The following example matches all block devices except sda1 and sda2:
[data_disk]
type=disk
devices=!sda1, !sda2
If no instance of a plug-in is specified, the plug-in is not enabled.
If the plug-in supports more options, they can be also specified in the plug-in section. If the option is not
specified and it was not previously specified in the included plug-in, the default value is used.
Short plug-in syntax

If you do not need custom names for the plug-in instance and there is only one definition of the instance
in your configuration file, Tuned supports the following short syntax:
[TYPE]
devices=DEVICES
In this case, it is possible to omit the type line. The instance is then referred to with a name, same as the
type. The previous example could be then rewritten into:
Example 2.5. Matching block devices using the short syntax
[disk]
devices=sdb*
Conflicting plug-in definitions in a profile

If the same section is specified more than once using the include option, the settings are merged. If
they cannot be merged due to a conflict, the last conflicting definition overrides the previous settings. If
you do not know what was previously defined, you can use the replace Boolean option and set it to true.
This causes all the previous definitions with the same name to be overwritten and the merge does not
happen.
You can also disable the plug-in by specifying the enabled=false option. This has the same effect as if
19
You can also disable the plug-in by specifying the enabled=false option. This has the same effect as if
the instance was never defined. Disabling the plug-in is useful if you are redefining the previous
definition from the include option and do not want the plug-in to be active in your custom profile.
Functionality not implemented in any plug-in

Tuned includes the ability to run any shell command as part of enabling or disabling a tuning profile. This
enables you to extend Tuned profiles with functionality that has not been integrated into Tuned yet.
You can specify arbitrary shell commands using the script plug-in.
2.6. AVAILABLE TUNED PLUG-INS

This section lists all monitoring and tuning plug-ins currently available in Tuned.
Monitoring plug-ins
Currently, the following monitoring plug-ins are implemented:
disk
Gets disk load (number of IO operations) per device and measurement interval.
net
Gets network load (number of transferred packets) per network card and measurement interval.
load
Gets CPU load per CPU and measurement interval.
Tuning plug-ins
Currently, the following tuning plug-ins are implemented. Only some of these plug-ins implement
dynamic tuning. Options supported by plug-ins are also listed:
cpu
Sets the CPU governor to the value specified by the governor option and dynamically changes the
Power Management Quality of Service (PM QoS) CPU Direct Memory Access (DMA) latency
according to the CPU load.
If the CPU load is lower than the value specified by the load_threshold option, the latency is set to
the value specified by the latency_high option, otherwise it is set to the value specified by
latency_low.
You can also force the latency to a specific value and prevent it from dynamically changing further.
To do so, set the force_latency option to the required latency value.
eeepc_she
Dynamically sets the front-side bus (FSB) speed according to the CPU load.
This feature can be found on some netbooks and is also known as the ASUS Super Hybrid Engine
(SHE).
If the CPU load is lower or equal to the value specified by the load_threshold_powersave option,
the plug-in sets the FSB speed to the value specified by the she_powersave option. If the CPU load
is higher or equal to the value specified by the load_threshold_normal option, it sets the FSB speed
to the value specified by the she_normal option.
Static tuning is not supported and the plug-in is transparently disabled if Tuned does not detect the
20
Static tuning is not supported and the plug-in is transparently disabled if Tuned does not detect the
hardware support for this feature.
net
Configures the Wake-on-LAN functionality to the values specified by the wake_on_lan option. It
uses the same syntax as the ethtool utility. It also dynamically changes the interface speed according
to the interface utilization.
sysctl
Sets various sysctl settings specified by the plug-in options.
The syntax is name=value, where name is the same as the name provided by the sysctl utility.
Use the sysctl plug-in if you need to change system settings that are not covered by other plug-ins
available in Tuned. If the settings are covered by some specific plug-ins, prefer these plug-ins.
usb
Sets autosuspend timeout of USB devices to the value specified by the autosuspend parameter.
The value 0 means that autosuspend is disabled.
vm
Enables or disables transparent huge pages depending on the Boolean value of the
transparent_hugepages option.
audio
Sets the autosuspend timeout for audio codecs to the value specified by the timeout option.
Currently, the snd_hda_intel and snd_ac97_codec codecs are supported. The value 0 means that
the autosuspend is disabled. You can also enforce the controller reset by setting the Boolean option
reset_controller to true.
disk
Sets the disk elevator to the value specified by the elevator option.
It also sets:
APM to the value specified by the apm option
Scheduler quantum to the value specified by the scheduler_quantum option
Disk spindown timeout to the value specified by the spindown option
Disk readahead to the value specified by the readahead parameter
The current disk readahead to a value multiplied by the constant specified by the
readahead_multiply option
In addition, this plug-in dynamically changes the advanced power management and spindown
timeout setting for the drive according to the current drive utilization. The dynamic tuning can be
controlled by the Boolean option dynamic and is enabled by default.
scsi_host
Tunes options for SCSI hosts.
It sets Aggressive Link Power Management (ALPM) to the value specified by the alpm option.
mounts
21
Enables or disables barriers for mounts according to the Boolean value of the disable_barriers
option.
script
Executes an external script or binary when the profile is loaded or unloaded. You can choose an
arbitrary executable.
IMPORTANT
The script plug-in is provided mainly for compatibility with earlier releases. Prefer
other Tuned plug-ins if they cover the required functionality.
Tuned calls the executable with one of the following arguments:
start when loading the profile
stop when unloading the profile
You need to correctly implement the stop action in your executable and revert all settings that you
changed during the start action. Otherwise, the roll-back step after changing your Tuned profile will
not work.
Bash scripts can import the /usr/lib/tuned/functions Bash library and use the functions defined
there. Use these functions only for functionality that is not natively provided by Tuned. If a function
name starts with an underscore, such as _wifi_set_power_level, consider the function private and do
not use it in your scripts, because it might change in the future.
Specify the path to the executable using the script parameter in the plug-in configuration.
Example 2.6. Running a Bash script from a profile
To run a Bash script named script.sh that is located in the profile directory, use:
[script]
script=${i:PROFILE_DIR}/script.sh
sysfs
Sets various sysfs settings specified by the plug-in options.
The syntax is name=value, where name is the sysfs path to use.
Use this plugin in case you need to change some settings that are not covered by other plug-ins.
Prefer specific plug-ins if they cover the required settings.
video
Sets various powersave levels on video cards. Currently, only the Radeon cards are supported.
The powersave level can be specified by using the radeon_powersave option. Supported values are:
default
auto
low
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mid
high
dynpm
dpm-battery
dpm-balanced
dpm-perfomance
For details, see www.x.org. Note that this plug-in is experimental and the option might change in
future releases.
bootloader
Adds options to the kernel command line. This plug-in supports only the GRUB 2 boot loader.
Customized non-standard location of the GRUB 2 configuration file can be specified by the
grub2_cfg_file option.
The kernel options are added to the current GRUB configuration and its templates. The system
needs to be rebooted for the kernel options to take effect.
Switching to another profile or manually stopping the tuned service removes the additional options.
If you shut down or reboot the system, the kernel options persist in the grub.cfg file.
The kernel options can be specified by the following syntax:
cmdline=arg1 arg2 ... argN
Example 2.7. Modifying the kernel command line
For example, to add the quiet kernel option to a Tuned profile, include the following lines in the
tuned.conf file:
[bootloader]
cmdline=quiet
The following is an example of a custom profile that adds the isolcpus=2 option to the kernel
command line:
[bootloader]
cmdline=isolcpus=2
2.7. VARIABLES AND BUILT-IN FUNCTIONS IN TUNED PROFILES

Variables and built-in functions expand at run time when a Tuned profile is activated.
Using Tuned variables reduces the amount of necessary typing in Tuned profiles. You can also:
Use various built-in functions together with Tuned variables
23
Create custom functions in Python and add them to Tuned in the form of plug-ins
Variables
There are no predefined variables in Tuned profiles. You can define your own variables by creating the
[variables] section in a profile and using the following syntax:
[variables]
variable_name=value
To expand the value of a variable in a profile, use the following syntax:
${variable_name}
Example 2.8. Isolating CPU cores using variables
In the following example, the ${isolated_cores} variable expands to 1,2; hence the kernel boots with
the isolcpus=1,2 option:
[variables]
isolated_cores=1,2
[bootloader]
cmdline=isolcpus=${isolated_cores}
The variables can be specified in a separate file. For example, you can add the following lines to
tuned.conf:
[variables]
include=/etc/tuned/my-variables.conf
[bootloader]
cmdline=isolcpus=${isolated_cores}
If you add the isolated_cores=1,2 option to the /etc/tuned/my-variables.conf file, the kernel boots
with the isolcpus=1,2 option.
Functions
To call a function, use the following syntax:
${f:function_name:argument_1:argument_2}
To expand the directory path where the profile and the tuned.conf file are located, use the
PROFILE_DIR function, which requires special syntax:
${i:PROFILE_DIR}
Example 2.9. Isolating CPU cores using variables and built-in functions
In the following example, the ${non_isolated_cores} variable expands to 0,3-5, and the
cpulist_invert built-in function is called with the 0,3-5 argument:
24
[variables]
non_isolated_cores=0,3-5
[bootloader]
cmdline=isolcpus=${f:cpulist_invert:${non_isolated_cores}}
The cpulist_invert function inverts the list of CPUs. For a 6-CPU machine, the inversion is 1,2, and
the kernel boots with the isolcpus=1,2 command-line option.
2.8. BUILT-IN FUNCTIONS AVAILABLE IN TUNED PROFILES

The following built-in functions are available in all Tuned profiles:
PROFILE_DIR
Returns the directory path where the profile and the tuned.conf file are located.
exec
Executes a process and returns its output.
assertion
Compares two arguments. If they do not match, the function logs text from the first argument and
aborts profile loading.
assertion_non_equal
Compares two arguments. If they match, the function logs text from the first argument and aborts
profile loading.
kb2s
Converts kilobytes to disk sectors.
s2kb
Converts disk sectors to kilobytes.
strip
Creates a string from all passed arguments and deletes both leading and trailing white space.
virt_check
Checks whether Tuned is running inside a virtual machine (VM) or on bare metal:
Inside a VM, the function returns the first argument.
On bare metal, the function returns the second argument, even in case of an error.
cpulist_invert
Inverts a list of CPUs to make its complement. For example, on a system with 4 CPUs, numbered
from 0 to 3, the inversion of the list 0,2,3 is 1.
cpulist2hex
Converts a CPU list to a hexadecimal CPU mask.
cpulist2hex_invert
Converts a CPU list to a hexadecimal CPU mask and inverts it.
25
hex2cpulist
Converts a hexadecimal CPU mask to a CPU list.
cpulist_online
Checks whether the CPUs from the list are online. Returns the list containing only online CPUs.
cpulist_present
Checks whether the CPUs from the list are present. Returns the list containing only present CPUs.
cpulist_unpack
Unpacks a CPU list in the form of 1-3,4 to 1,2,3,4.
cpulist_pack
Packs a CPU list in the form of 1,2,3,5 to 1-3,5.
2.9. CREATING NEW TUNED PROFILES

This procedure creates a new Tuned profile with custom performance rules.
Prerequisites
The tuned service is installed and running. See Section 1.6, “Installing and enabling Tuned” for
details.
Procedure
1. In the /etc/tuned/ directory, create a new directory named the same as the profile that you want
to create:
# mkdir /etc/tuned/my-profile
2. In the new directory, create a file named tuned.conf. Add a [main] section and plug-in
definitions in it, according to your requirements.
For example, see the configuration of the balanced profile:
[main]
summary=General non-specialized tuned profile
[cpu]
governor=conservative
energy_perf_bias=normal
[audio]
timeout=10
[video]
radeon_powersave=dpm-balanced, auto
[scsi_host]
alpm=medium_power
3. To activate the profile, use:
# tuned-adm profile my-profile
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4. Verify that the Tuned profile is active and the system settings are applied:
$ tuned-adm active
Current active profile: my-profile
$ tuned-adm verify

2.10. MODIFYING EXISTING TUNED PROFILES

This procedure creates a modified child profile based on an existing Tuned profile.
Prerequisites
The tuned service is installed and running. See Section 1.6, “Installing and enabling Tuned” for
details.
Procedure
1. In the /etc/tuned/ directory, create a new directory named the same as the profile that you want
to create:
# mkdir /etc/tuned/modified-profile
2. In the new directory, create a file named tuned.conf, and set the [main] section as follows:
[main]
include=parent-profile
Replace parent-profile with the name of the profile you are modifying.
3. Include your profile modifications.

Example 2.10. Lowering swappiness in the throughput-performance profile
To use the settings from the throughput-performance profile and change the value of
vm.swappiness to 5, instead of the default 10, use:
[main]
include=throughput-performance
[sysctl]
vm.swappiness=5
4. To activate the profile, use:
27
# tuned-adm profile modified-profile
5. Verify that the Tuned profile is active and the system settings are applied:
$ tuned-adm active
$ tuned-adm verify

2.11. SETTING THE DISK SCHEDULER USING TUNED

This procedure creates and enables a Tuned profile that sets a given disk scheduler for selected block
devices. The setting persists across system reboots.
In the following commands and configuration, replace:
device with the name of the block device, for example sdf
selected-scheduler with the disk scheduler that you want to set for the device, for example bfq
Prerequisites
The tuned service is installed and enabled.

For details, see Section 1.6, “Installing and enabling Tuned” .
Procedure
1. Optional: Select an existing Tuned profile on which your profile will be based. For a list of
available profiles, see Section 1.3, “Tuned profiles distributed with RHEL” .
To see which profile is currently active, use:
$ tuned-adm active
2. Create a new directory to hold your Tuned profile:
3. Find the World Wide Name (WWN) identifier of the selected block device:
$ udevadm info --query=property --name=/dev/device | grep WWN=
ID_WWN=0x5002538d00000000
4. Create the /etc/tuned/my-profile/tuned.conf configuration file. In the file, set the following
options:
28
Optional: Include an existing profile:
[main]
include=existing-profile
Set the selected disk scheduler for the device that matches the WWN identifier:
[disk]
devices_udev_regex=ID_WWN=0x5002538d00000000
elevator=selected-scheduler
To match multiple devices in the devices_udev_regex option, separate the identifiers with
commas:
devices_udev_regex=ID_WWN=0x5002538d00000000,
ID_WWN=0x1234567800000000
5. Enable your profile:
$ tuned-adm active
$ tuned-adm verify
Verification succeeded, current system settings match the preset profile.

For more information on creating a Tuned profile, see Chapter 2, Customizing Tuned profiles .
2.12. RELATED INFORMATION

The Tuned project website: https://tuned-project.org/
29
CHAPTER 3. USING THE WEB CONSOLE FOR SELECTING

PERFORMANCE PROFILES
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 includes performance profiles optimizing:
Systems using Desktop
Latency performance
Network performance
Low power consumption
Virtual machines
The following procedure describes setting up performance profiles in the web console.
The RHEL 8 web console configures the tuned service.
For details about the tuned service, see Monitoring and managing system status and performance .
Prerequisites
The web console must be installed and accessible.
For details, see Installing the web console .
Procedure
1. Log in to the RHEL 8 web console.
For details, see Logging in to the web console .
2. Click System.
3. In the Performance Profile field, click the current performance profile.
4. In the Change Performance Profile dialog box, change the profile if necessary.
5. Click Change.
30
CHAPTER 3. USING THE WEB CONSOLE FOR SELECTING PERFORMANCE PROFILES
The change is now available in the System tab.
31
CHAPTER 4. SETTING THE DISK SCHEDULER

The disk scheduler is responsible for ordering the I/O requests submitted to a storage device.
You can configure the scheduler in several different ways:
Set the scheduler using Tuned, as described in Section 4.6, “Setting the disk scheduler using
Tuned”
Set the scheduler using udev, as described in Section 4.7, “Setting the disk scheduler using
udev rules”
Temporarily change the scheduler on a running system, as described in Section 4.8,

“Temporarily setting a scheduler for a specific disk”
4.1. DISK SCHEDULER CHANGES IN RHEL 8

In RHEL 8, block devices support only multi-queue scheduling. This enables the block layer performance
to scale well with fast solid-state drives (SSDs) and multi-core systems.
The traditional, single-queue schedulers, which were available in RHEL 7 and earlier versions, have been
removed.
4.2. AVAILABLE DISK SCHEDULERS

The following multi-queue disk schedulers are supported in RHEL 8:
Disk schedulers
none
Implements a first-in first-out (FIFO) scheduling algorithm. It merges requests at the generic block
layer through a simple last-hit cache.
mq-deadline
Attempts to provide a guaranteed latency for requests from the point at which requests reach the
scheduler.
The mq-deadline scheduler sorts queued I/O requests into a read or write batch and then schedules
them for execution in increasing logical block addressing (LBA) order. By default, read batches take
precedence over write batches, because applications are more likely to block on read I/O operations.
After mq-deadline processes a batch, it checks how long write operations have been starved of
processor time and schedules the next read or write batch as appropriate.
This scheduler is suitable for most use cases, but particularly those in which read operations occur
more often than write operations.
bfq
Targets desktop systems and interactive tasks.
The bfq scheduler ensures that a single application is never using all of the bandwidth. In effect, the
storage device is always as responsive as if it was idle. The system does not become unresponsive
when copying large files. In its default configuration, bfq focuses on delivering the lowest latency
rather than achieving the maximum throughput.
bfq is based on cfq code. It does not grant the disk to each process for a fixed time slice but assigns a
budget measured in number of sectors to the process.
32
kyber
Is intended for fast devices. The scheduler tunes itself to achieve a latency goal. You can configure
the target latencies for read and synchronous write requests.
4.3. RECOMMENDED DISK SCHEDULERS FOR DIFFERENT USE CASES

Depending on the task that your system performs, Red Hat recommends the following disk schedulers:
Table 4.1. Recommendations
Use case Disk scheduler recommendation
Traditional HDD with a SCSI interface Use mq-deadline or bfq.
High-performance SSD or a CPU-bound system with Use none, especially when running enterprise
fast storage applications. Alternatively, use kyber.
Desktop or interactive tasks Use bfq.
Virtual guest Use mq-deadline . With a multi-queue host bus

adapter (HBA), use none.
4.4. THE DEFAULT DISK SCHEDULER

Block devices use the default disk scheduler unless you specify another scheduler.
The kernel selects a default disk scheduler based on the type of device. The automatically selected
scheduler is typically the optimal setting. If you require a different scheduler, Red Hat recommends to
use udev rules or the Tuned application to configure it. Match the selected devices and switch the
scheduler only for those devices.
4.5. DETERMINING THE ACTIVE DISK SCHEDULER

This procedure determines which disk scheduler is currently active on a given block device.
Procedure
Read the content of the /sys/block/device/queue/scheduler file:
# cat /sys/block/device/queue/scheduler
[mq-deadline] kyber bfq none
In the file name, replace device with the block device name, for example sdc.
The active scheduler is listed in square brackets ([ ]).
4.6. SETTING THE DISK SCHEDULER USING TUNED

This procedure creates and enables a Tuned profile that sets a given disk scheduler for selected block
devices. The setting persists across system reboots.
33
Prerequisites
The tuned service is installed and enabled.

For details, see Section 1.6, “Installing and enabling Tuned” .
Procedure
1. Optional: Select an existing Tuned profile on which your profile will be based. For a list of
available profiles, see Section 1.3, “Tuned profiles distributed with RHEL” .
To see which profile is currently active, use:
$ tuned-adm active
2. Create a new directory to hold your Tuned profile:
3. Find the World Wide Name (WWN) identifier of the selected block device:
$ udevadm info --query=property --name=/dev/device | grep WWN=
ID_WWN=0x5002538d00000000
4. Create the /etc/tuned/my-profile/tuned.conf configuration file. In the file, set the following
options:
Optional: Include an existing profile:
[main]
include=existing-profile
Set the selected disk scheduler for the device that matches the WWN identifier:
[disk]
devices_udev_regex=ID_WWN=0x5002538d00000000
elevator=selected-scheduler
To match multiple devices in the devices_udev_regex option, separate the identifiers with
commas:
devices_udev_regex=ID_WWN=0x5002538d00000000,
ID_WWN=0x1234567800000000
5. Enable your profile:
34
$ tuned-adm active
$ tuned-adm verify
Verification succeeded, current system settings match the preset profile.

For more information on creating a Tuned profile, see Chapter 2, Customizing Tuned profiles .
4.7. SETTING THE DISK SCHEDULER USING UDEV RULES

This procedure sets a given disk scheduler for specific block devices using udev rules. The setting
persists across system reboots.
Procedure
1. Find the World Wide Identifier (WWID) of the block device:
$ udevadm info --attribute-walk --name=/dev/device | grep wwid
ATTRS{wwid}=="device WWID"
An example value of device WWID is:
t10.ATA SAMSUNG MZNLN256HMHQ-000L7 S2WDNX0J336519
2. Configure the udev rule. Create the /etc/udev/rules.d/99-scheduler.rules file with the
following content:
ACTION=="add|change", SUBSYSTEM=="block", ATTRS{wwid}=="device WWID",

ATTR{queue/scheduler}="selected-scheduler"
Replace device WWID with the WWID value that you found in the previous steps.
3. Reload udev rules:
# udevadm control --reload-rules
4. Apply the scheduler configuration:
# udevadm trigger --type=devices --action=change
5. Verify the active scheduler:
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4.8. TEMPORARILY SETTING A SCHEDULER FOR A SPECIFIC DISK

This procedure sets a given disk scheduler for specific block devices. The setting does not persist across
system reboots.
Procedure
Write the name of the selected scheduler to the /sys/block/device/queue/scheduler file:
# echo selected-scheduler > /sys/block/device/queue/scheduler
In the file name, replace device with the block device name, for example sdc.
Verification steps
Verify that the scheduler is active on the device:
36
CHAPTER 5. TUNING THE PERFORMANCE OF A SAMBA SERVER
CHAPTER 5. TUNING THE PERFORMANCE OF A SAMBA

SERVER
This chapter describes what settings can improve the performance of Samba in certain situations, and
which settings can have a negative performance impact.
Parts of this section were adopted from the Performance Tuning documentation published in the Samba
Wiki. License: CC BY 4.0. Authors and contributors: See the history tab on the Wiki page.
Prerequisites
Samba is set up as a file or print server
See Using Samba as a server .
5.1. SETTING THE SMB PROTOCOL VERSION

Each new SMB version adds features and improves the performance of the protocol. The recent
Windows and Windows Server operating systems always supports the latest protocol version. If Samba
also uses the latest protocol version, Windows clients connecting to Samba benefit from the
performance improvements. In Samba, the default value of the server max protocol is set to the latest
supported stable SMB protocol version.
NOTE
To always have the latest stable SMB protocol version enabled, do not set the server
max protocol parameter. If you set the parameter manually, you will need to modify the
setting with each new version of the SMB protocol, to have the latest protocol version
enabled.
The following procedure explains how to use the default value in the server max protocol parameter.
Procedure
1. Remove the server max protocol parameter from the [global] section in the
/etc/samba/smb.conf file.
2. Reload the Samba configuration
# smbcontrol all reload-config
5.2. TUNING SHARES WITH DIRECTORIES THAT CONTAIN A LARGE

NUMBER OF FILES
Linux supports case-sensitive file names. For this reason, Samba needs to scan directories for
uppercase and lowercase file names when searching or accessing a file. You can configure a share to
create new files only in lowercase or uppercase, which improves the performance.
Prerequisites
Samba is configured as a file server
Procedure
37
1. Rename all files on the share to lowercase.
NOTE
Using the settings in this procedure, files with names other than in lowercase will
no longer be displayed.
2. Set the following parameters in the share’s section:
case sensitive = true

default case = lower
preserve case = no
short preserve case = no
For details about the parameters, see their descriptions in the smb.conf(5) man page.
3. Verify the /etc/samba/smb.conf file:
# testparm
4. Reload the Samba configuration:
# smbcontrol all reload-config
After you applied these settings, the names of all newly created files on this share use lowercase.
Because of these settings, Samba no longer needs to scan the directory for uppercase and lowercase,
which improves the performance.
Verifying the smb.conf file by using the testparm utility
5.3. SETTINGS THAT CAN HAVE A NEGATIVE PERFORMANCE IMPACT

By default, the kernel in Red Hat Enterprise Linux is tuned for high network performance. For example,
the kernel uses an auto-tuning mechanism for buffer sizes. Setting the socket options parameter in the
/etc/samba/smb.conf file overrides these kernel settings. As a result, setting this parameter decreases
the Samba network performance in most cases.
To use the optimized settings from the Kernel, remove the socket options parameter from the [global]
section in the /etc/samba/smb.conf.
38
CHAPTER 6. OPTIMIZING VIRTUAL MACHINE PERFORMANCE IN RHEL 8
CHAPTER 6. OPTIMIZING VIRTUAL MACHINE PERFORMANCE

IN RHEL 8
Virtual machines (VMs) always experience some degree of performance deterioration in comparison to
the host. The following sections describe the reasons why that is and provide instructions how to
minimize the performance impact of virtualization, so that your hardware infrastructure resources can
be used as efficiently as possible.
6.1. WHAT INFLUENCES VIRTUAL MACHINE PERFORMANCE

VMs are run as user-space processes on the host. The hypervisor therefore needs to convert the host’s
system resources so that the VMs can use them. As a consequence, a portion of the resources is
consumed by the conversion, and the VM therefore cannot achieve the same performance as the host.
More specific reasons for VM performance lossinclude:
Virtual CPUs (vCPUs) are implemented as threads on the host, handled by the Linux scheduler.
VMs do not automatically inherit optimization features such as NUMA and huge pages from the
host kernel.
Disk and network I/O settings of the host might have a significant performance impact on the
VM.
Network traffic typically travels to a VM through a software-based bridge.
Depending on the host devices and their models, there might be significant overhead due to
emulation of particular hardware.
Nevertheless, a variety of features are available that you can use to reduce the negative performance
effects of virtualization. Notably:
The tuned service can automatically optimize the resource distribution and performance of
your VMs.
Block I/O tuning can improve the performances of the VM’s block devices, such as disks.
NUMA tuning can increase vCPU performance.
Virtual networking can be optimized in various ways.
NOTE
Tuning VM performance can have adverse effects on other virtualization functions. For
example, it can make migrating the modified VM more difficult.
6.2. OPTIMIZING VIRTUAL MACHINE PERFORMANCE USING TUNED

The tuned utility is a tuning profile delivery mechanism that adapts RHEL for certain workload
characteristics, such as requirements for CPU-intensive tasks or storage-network throughput
responsiveness. It provides a number of tuning profiles that are pre-configured to enhance performance
and reduce power consumption in a number of specific use cases. You can edit these profiles or create
new profiles to create performance solutions tailored to your environment, including virtualized
environments.
39
Red Hat recommends using the following profiles when using virtualization in RHEL 8:
For RHEL 8 virtual machines, use the virtual-guest profile. It is based on the generally
applicable throughput-performance profile, but also decreases the swappiness of virtual
memory.
For RHEL 8 virtualization hosts, use the virtual-host profile. This enables more aggressive
writeback of dirty memory pages, which benefits the host performance.
Prerequisites
The tuned service must be installed and enabled.
Procedure
To enable a specific tuned profile:
1. List the available tuned profiles.
# tuned-adm list
Available profiles:
- balanced - General non-specialized tuned profile
- desktop - Optimize for the desktop use-case
[...]
- virtual-guest - Optimize for running inside a virtual guest
- virtual-host - Optimize for running KVM guests
2. [Optional] Create a new tuned profile or edit an existing tuned profile.

For more information, see Customizing tuned profiles .
3. Activate a tuned profile.
# tuned-adm profile selected-profile
To optimize a virtualization host, use the virtual-host profile.
# tuned-adm profile virtual-host
On a RHEL guest operating system, use the virtual-guest profile.
# tuned-adm profile virtual-guest
For more information about tuned and tuned profiles, see Monitoring and managing system
status and performance.
6.3. OPTIMIZING VIRTUAL MACHINE I/O PERFORMANCE

The input and output (I/O) capabilities of a virtual machine (VM) can create a significant limitation to
the VM’s overall efficiency. To address this, you can optimize a VM’s I/O by configuring block I/O
parameters.
40
6.3.1. Tuning block I/O in virtual machines

When multiple block devices are being used by one or more VMs, it might be important to adjust the I/O
priority of specific virtual devices by modifying their I/O weights.
Increasing the I/O weight of a device increases its priority for I/O bandwidth, and therefore provides it
with more host resources. Similarly, reducing a device’s weight makes it consume less host resources.
NOTE
Each device’s weight value must be within the 100 to 1000 range. Alternatively, the
value can be `0, which removes that device from per-device listings.
Procedure
To display and set a VM’s block I/O parameters:
1. Display the current <blkio> parameters for a VM:

# virsh blkiotune virtual_machine
<domain>
...
<blkiotune>
<weight>800</weight>
<device>
<path>/dev/sda</path>
</device>
<device>
<path>/dev/sdb</path>
</device>
</blkiotune>
...
</domain>
2. Edit the I/O weight of a specified device:
# virsh blkiotune VM-name --device-weights device, I/O-weight
For example, the following changes the weight of the /dev/sda device in the liftrul VM to 500.
# *virsh blkiotune liftbrul --device-weights /dev/sda, 500
6.3.2. Disk I/O throttling in virtual machines

When several VMs are running simultaneously, they can interfere with system performance by using
excessive disk I/O. Disk I/O throttling in KVM virtualization provides the ability to set a limit on disk I/O
requests sent from VMs to the host machine. This can prevent a VM from over-utilizing shared resources
and impacting the performance of other VMs.
To enable disk I/O throttling, set a limit on disk I/O requests sent from each block device attached to
VMs to the host machine.
Procedure
41
1. Use the virsh domblklist command for a list of disk device names on a specified VM.
# virsh domblklist rollin-coal

Target Source
------------------------------------------------
vda /var/lib/libvirt/images/rollin-coal.qcow2
sda -
sdb /home/horridly-demanding-processes.iso
2. Set I/O limits for a block device attached to a VM using the virsh blkdeviotune command:
# virsh blkdeviotune VM-name device --parameter limit
For example, to throttle the sdb device on the rollin-coal VM to 1000 I/O operations per
second and 50 MB per second throughput:
# virsh blkdeviotune rollin-coal sdb --total-iops-sec 1000 --total-bytes-sec 52428800
Additional information
Disk I/O throttling can be useful in various situations, for example when VMs belonging to
different customers are running on the same host, or when quality of service guarantees are
given for different VMs. Disk I/O throttling can also be used to simulate slower disks.
I/O throttling can be applied independently to each block device attached to a VM and
supports limits on throughput and I/O operations.
6.3.3. Enabling multi-queue virtio-scsi

When using virtio-scsi storage devices in your virtual machines (VMs), the multi-queue virtio-scsi
feature provides improved storage performance and scalability. It enables each virtual CPU to have a
separate queue and interrupt to use without affecting other vCPUs.
Procedure
To enable multi-queue virtio-scsi support for a specific VM, add the following to the VM’s XML
configuration, where N is the total number of vCPU queues:
<controller type='scsi' index='0' model='virtio-scsi'>

<driver queues='N' />
</controller>
6.4. OPTIMIZING VIRTUAL MACHINE CPU PERFORMANCE

Much like physical CPUs in host machines, vCPUs are critical to virtual machine (VM) performance. As a
result, optimizing vCPUs can have a significant impact on the resource efficiency of your VMs. To
optimize your vCPU:
1. Ensure that the vCPU model is aligned with the CPU model of the host. For example, to set the
testguest1 VM to use the CPU model of the host:
# virt-xml testguest1 --edit --cpu host-model
2. If your host machine uses Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA), you can also configure NUMA
42
for its VMs. This maps the host’s CPU and memory processes to CPU and memory processes
on the VM as closely as possible. In effect, NUMA tuning provides the vCPU with a more
streamlined access to the system memory allocated to the VM, which can improve the vCPU
processing effectiveness.
For details, see Section 6.4.1, “Configuring NUMA in a virtual machine” and Section 6.4.2,
“Sample vCPU performance tuning scenario”.
6.4.1. Configuring NUMA in a virtual machine

The following methods can be used to configure Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) settings of a
virtual machine (VM) on a RHEL 8 host.
Prerequisites
The host must be a NUMA-compatible machine. To detect whether this is the case, use the
virsh nodeinfo command and see the NUMA cell(s) line:
# virsh nodeinfo
CPU model: x86_64
CPU(s): 48
CPU frequency: 1200 MHz
CPU socket(s): 1
Core(s) per socket: 12
Thread(s) per core: 2
NUMA cell(s): 2
Memory size: 67012964 KiB
If the value of the line is 2 or greater, the host is NUMA-compatible.
Procedure
For ease of use, you can set up a VM’s NUMA configuration using automated utilities and services.
However, manual NUMA setup is more likely to yield a significant performance improvement.
Automatic methods
Set the VM’s NUMA policy to Preferred. For example, to do so for the testguest5 VM:
# virt-xml testguest5 --edit --vcpus placement=auto

# virt-xml testguest5 --edit --numatune mode=preferred
Enable automatic NUMA balancing on the host:
# echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/numa_balancing
Use the numad command to automatically align the VM CPU with memory resources.
# numad
Manual methods
1. Pin specific vCPU threads to a specific host CPU or range of CPUs. This is possible also on non-
NUMA hosts and VMs, and is recommended as a safe method of vCPU performance
improvement.
For example, the following commands pin vCPU threads 0 to 5 of the testguest6 VM to host
CPUs 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, and 11, respectively:
43
# virsh vcpupin testguest6 0 1

Afterwards, you can verify whether this was successful:
# virsh vcpupin testguest6

VCPU CPU Affinity
----------------------
0 1
1 3
2 5
3 7
4 9
5 11
2. After pinning vCPU threads, you can also pin QEMU process threads associated with a specified
VM to a specific host CPU or range of CPUs. For example, the following commands pin the
QEMU process thread of testguest6 to CPUs 13 and 15, and verify this was successful:
# virsh emulatorpin testguest6 13,15

# virsh emulatorpin testguest6
emulator: CPU Affinity
----------------------------------
*: 13,15
3. Finally, you can also specify which host NUMA nodes will be assigned specifically to a certain
VM. This can improve the host memory usage by the VM’s vCPU. For example, the following
commands set testguest6 to use host NUMA nodes 3 to 5, and verify this was successful:
# virsh numatune testguest6 --nodeset 3-5

# virsh numatune testguest6
Note that for best performance results, it is recommended to use all of the manual tuning
methods listed above. For an example of such a configuration, see Section 6.4.2, “Sample vCPU
performance tuning scenario”.
To see the current NUMA configuration of your system, you can use the numastat utility. For
details on using numastat, see Section 6.6, “Virtual machine performance monitoring tools” .
6.4.2. Sample vCPU performance tuning scenario

To obtain the best vCPU performance possible, Red Hat recommends using manual vcpupin,
emulatorpin, and numatune settings together, for example like in the following scenario.
Starting scenario
Your host has the following hardware specifics:
2 NUMA nodes
44
3 CPU cores on each node
2 threads on each core
The output of virsh nodeinfo of such a machine would look similar to:
# virsh nodeinfo
CPU model: x86_64
CPU(s): 12
CPU frequency: 3661 MHz
CPU socket(s): 2
Core(s) per socket: 3
Thread(s) per core: 2
NUMA cell(s): 2
Memory size: 31248692 KiB
You intend to modify an existing VM to have 8 vCPUs, which means that it will not fit in a single
NUMA node.
Therefore, you should distribute 4 vCPUs on each NUMA node and make the vCPU topology
resemble the host topology as closely as possible. This means that vCPUs that run as sibling
threads of a given physical CPU should be pinned to host threads on the same core. For details,
see the Solution below:
Solution
1. Obtain the information on the host topology:
# virsh capabilities
The output should include a section that looks similar to the following:
<topology>
<cells num="2">
<cell id="0">
<memory unit="KiB">15624346</memory>
<pages unit="KiB" size="4">3906086</pages>
<distances>
<sibling id="0" value="10" />
</distances>
<cpus num="6">
<cpu id="0" socket_id="0" core_id="0" siblings="0,3" />
</cpus>
</cell>
<cell id="1">
<memory unit="KiB">15624346</memory>
45

<distances>
</distances>
<cpus num="6">
</cpus>
</cell>
</cells>
</topology>
2. [Optional] Test the performance of the VM using the applicable tools and utilities.
3. Set up and mount 1 GiB huge pages on the host:
a. Add the following line to the host’s kernel command line:
default_hugepagesz=1G hugepagesz=1G
b. Create the /etc/systemd/system/hugetlb-gigantic-pages.service file with the following

content:
[Unit]
Description=HugeTLB Gigantic Pages Reservation
DefaultDependencies=no
Before=dev-hugepages.mount
ConditionPathExists=/sys/devices/system/node
ConditionKernelCommandLine=hugepagesz=1G
[Service]
Type=oneshot
RemainAfterExit=yes
ExecStart=/etc/systemd/hugetlb-reserve-pages.sh
[Install]
WantedBy=sysinit.target
c. Create the /etc/systemd/hugetlb-reserve-pages.sh file with the following content:
#!/bin/sh
nodes_path=/sys/devices/system/node/
if [ ! -d $nodes_path ]; then
echo "ERROR: $nodes_path does not exist"
exit 1
fi
reserve_pages()
{
46
echo $1 > $nodes_path/$2/hugepages/hugepages-1048576kB/nr_hugepages

}
reserve_pages 4 node1
reserve_pages 4 node2
This reserves four 1GiB huge pages from node1 and four 1GiB huge pages from node2.
d. Make the script created in the previous step executable:
# chmod +x /etc/systemd/hugetlb-reserve-pages.sh
e. Enable huge page reservation on boot:
# systemctl enable hugetlb-gigantic-pages
4. Use the virsh edit command to edit the XML configuration of the VM you wish to optimize, in
this example super-VM:
# virsh edit super-vm
5. Adjust the XML configuration of the VM in the following way:
Set the VM to use 8 static vCPUs. Use the <vcpu/> element to do this.
Pin each of the vCPU threads to the corresponding host CPU threads that it mirrors in
topology. To do so, use the <vcpupin/> elements in the <cputune> section.
Note that, as shown by virsh capabilities above, host CPU threads are not ordered
sequentially in their respective cores. In addition, the vCPU threads should be pinned to the
highest available set of host cores on the same NUMA node. For a table illustration, see the
Additional Resources section below.
Configure the VM’s NUMA nodes to use memory from the corresponding NUMA nodes on
the host. To do so, use the <memnode/> elements in the <numatune/> section.
Ensure the CPU mode is set to host-passthrough, and that the CPU uses cache in
passthrough mode.
The resulting XML configuration should include a section similar to the following:
[...]
<memoryBacking>
<hugepages>
<page size='1' unit='GiB'/>
</hugepages>
</memoryBacking>
<vcpu placement='static'>8</vcpu>
<cputune>
<vcpupin vcpu='0' cpuset='1'/>
47

<emulatorpin cpuset='6,9'/>
</cputune>
<numatune>
<memory mode="preferred" nodeset="1"/>
<memnode cellid="0" mode="strict" nodeset="0"/>
<memnode cellid="1" mode="strict" nodeset="1"/>
</numatune>
<cpu mode="host-passthrough">
<topology sockets="2" cores="2" threads="2"/>
<cache mode="passthrough"/>
<numa>
<cell id="0" cpus="0-3" memory="2" unit="GiB">
<distances>
<sibling id="0" value="10"/>
</distances>
</cell>
<cell id="1" cpus="4-7" memory="2" unit="GiB">
<distances>
</distances>
</cell>
</numa>
</cpu>
</domain>
6. [Optional] Test the performance of the VM using the applicable tools and utilities to evaluate
the impact of the VM’s optimization.
The following tables illustrate the connections between the vCPUs and the host CPUs they
should be pinned to:
Table 6.1. Host topology
CPU threads 0 3 1 4 2 5 6 9 7 10 8 11
Cores 0 1 2 3 4 5
Sockets 0 1
NUMA nodes 0 1
Table 6.2. VM topology
vCPU threads 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Cores 0 1 2 3
Sockets 0 1
48
NUMA nodes 0 1
Table 6.3. Combined host and VM topology
vCPU threads 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Host CPU 0 3 1 4 2 5 6 9 7 10 8 11
threads
Cores 0 1 2 3 4 5
Sockets 0 1
NUMA nodes 0 1
In this scenario, there are 2 NUMA nodes and 8 vCPUs. Therefore, 4 vCPU threads should be
pinned to each node.
In addition, Red Hat recommends leaving at least a single CPU thread available on each node
for host system operations.
Because in this example, each NUMA node houses 3 cores, each with 2 host CPU threads, the
set for node 0 translates as follows:

6.5. OPTIMIZING VIRTUAL MACHINE NETWORK PERFORMANCE

Due to the virtual nature of a VM’s network interface card (NIC), the VM loses a portion of the host
network bandwidth it is allocated, which can reduce the overall workload efficiency of the VM. The
following tips can minimize the negative impact of virtualization on the virtual NIC (vNIC) throughput.
Procedure
Use any of the following methods and observe if it has a beneficial effect on your VM network
performance:
Enable the vhost_net module

On the host, ensure the vhost_net kernel feature is enabled:
# lsmod | grep vhost

vhost_net 32768 1
vhost 53248 1 vhost_net
tap 24576 1 vhost_net
tun 57344 6 vhost_net
If the output of this command is blank, enable the vhost_net kernel module:
49
# modprobe vhost_net
Set up multi-queue virtio-net

To set up the multi-queue virtio-net feature for a VM, use the virsh edit command to edit to the
XML configuration of the VM. In the XML, add the following to the <devices> section, and replace N
with the number of vCPUs in the VM, up to 16:
<interface type='network'>
<source network='default'/>
<model type='virtio'/>
<driver name='vhost' queues='N'/>
</interface>
If the VM is running, restart it for the changes to take effect.
Set up vhost zero-copy transmit

If using a network with large packet size, enable the vhost zero-copy transmit feature.
Note that this feature only improves the performance when transmitting large packets between a
guest network and an external network. It does not affect performance for guest-to-guest and
guest-to-host workloads. In addition, it is likely to have a negative impact on the performance of
small packet workloads.
Also, enabling zero-copy transmit can cause head-of-line blocking of packets, which may create a
potential security risk.
To enable vhost zero-copy transmit:
1. On the host, disable the vhost-net kernel module:
# modprobe -r vhost_net
2. Re-enable the vhost-net module with the zero-copy parameter turned on:
# modprobe vhost-net experimental_zcopytx=1
3. Check whether zero-copy transmit was enabled successfully:
# cat /sys/module/vhost_net/parameters/experimental_zcopytx
1
Batching network packets

In Linux VM configurations with a long transmission path, batching packets before submitting them
to the kernel may improve cache utilization. To set up packet batching, use the following command
on the host, and replace tap0 with the name of the network interface that the VMs use:
# ethtool -C tap0 rx-frames 128
For additional information on virtual network connection types and tips for usage, see
Understanding virtual networking .
50
6.6. VIRTUAL MACHINE PERFORMANCE MONITORING TOOLS

To recognize what consumes the most VM resources and which aspect of VM performance needs
optimization, both general and VM-specific performance diagnostic tools can be used.
Default OS performance monitoring tools

For standard performance evaluation, you can use the utilities provided by default by your host and
guest operating systems:
On your RHEL 8 host, as root, use the top utility or the system monitor application, and look for
qemu and virt in the output. This shows how much host system resources your VMs are
consuming.
If the monitoring tool displays that any of the qemu or virt processes consume a large
portion of the host CPU or memory capacity, use the perf utility to investigate. For details,
see below.
In addition, if a vhost_net thread process, named for example vhost_net-1234, is displayed

as consuming an excessive amount of host CPU capacity, consider using virtual network
optimization features, such as multi-queue virtio-net.
On the guest operating system, use performance utilities and applications available on the
system to evaluate which processes consume the most system resources.
On Linux systems, you can use the top utility.
On Windows systems, you can use the Task Manager application.
perf kvm
You can use the perf utility to collect and analyze virtualization-specific statistics about the
performance of your RHEL 8 host. To do so:
1. On the host, install the perf package:
# yum install perf
2. Use the perf kvm stat command to display perf statistics for your virtualization host:
For real-time monitoring of your hypervisor, use the perf kvm stat live command.
To log the perf data of your hypervisor over a period of time, activate the logging using the
perf kvm stat record command. After the command is canceled or interrupted, the data is
saved in the perf.data.guest file, which can be analyzed using the perf kvm stat report
command.
3. Analyze the perf output for types of VM-EXIT events and their distribution. For example, the
PAUSE_INSTRUCTION events should be infrequent, but in the following output, the high
occurrence of this event suggests that the host CPUs are not handling the running vCPUs well.
In such a scenario, consider powering down some of your active VMs, removing vCPUs from
these VMs, or tuning the performance of the vCPUs.
# perf kvm stat report
Analyze events for all VMs, all VCPUs:
VM-EXIT Samples Samples% Time% Min Time Max Time Avg time
51
EXTERNAL_INTERRUPT 365634 31.59% 18.04% 0.42us 58780.59us

204.08us ( +- 0.99% )
MSR_WRITE 293428 25.35% 0.13% 0.59us 17873.02us 1.80us ( +-
4.63% )
PREEMPTION_TIMER 276162 23.86% 0.23% 0.51us 21396.03us 3.38us (
+- 5.19% )
PAUSE_INSTRUCTION 189375 16.36% 11.75% 0.72us 29655.25us 256.77us
( +- 0.70% )
HLT 20440 1.77% 69.83% 0.62us 79319.41us 14134.56us ( +- 0.79%
)
VMCALL 12426 1.07% 0.03% 1.02us 5416.25us 8.77us ( +- 7.36%
)
EXCEPTION_NMI 27 0.00% 0.00% 0.69us 1.34us 0.98us ( +-
3.50% )
EPT_MISCONFIG 5 0.00% 0.00% 5.15us 10.85us 7.88us ( +-
11.67% )
Total Samples:1157497, Total events handled time:413728274.66us.
Other event types that can signal problems in the output of perf kvm stat include:
INSN_EMULATION - suggests suboptimal VM I/O configuration .
For more information on using perf to monitor virtualization performance, see the perf-kvm man page.
numastat
To see the current NUMA configuration of your system, you can use the numastat utility, which is
provided by installing the numactl package.
The following shows a host with 4 running VMs, each obtaining memory from multiple NUMA nodes. This
is not optimal for vCPU performance, and warrants adjusting:
# numastat -c qemu-kvm
Per-node process memory usage (in MBs)

PID Node 0 Node 1 Node 2 Node 3 Node 4 Node 5 Node 6 Node 7 Total
--------------- ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ -----
51722 (qemu-kvm) 68 16 357 6936 2 3 147 598 8128
51747 (qemu-kvm) 245 11 5 18 5172 2532 1 92 8076
53736 (qemu-kvm) 62 432 1661 506 4851 136 22 445 8116
53773 (qemu-kvm) 1393 3 1 2 12 0 0 6702 8114
--------------- ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ -----
Total 1769 463 2024 7462 10037 2672 169 7837 32434
In contrast, the following shows memory being provided to each VM by a single node, which is
significantly more efficient.
# numastat -c qemu-kvm
Per-node process memory usage (in MBs)

PID Node 0 Node 1 Node 2 Node 3 Node 4 Node 5 Node 6 Node 7 Total
--------------- ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ -----
51747 (qemu-kvm) 0 0 7 0 8072 0 1 0 8080
53736 (qemu-kvm) 0 0 7 0 0 0 8113 0 8120
53773 (qemu-kvm) 0 0 7 0 0 0 1 8110 8118
52
59065 (qemu-kvm) 0 0 8050 0 0 0 0 0 8051

--------------- ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ -----
Total 0 0 8072 0 8072 0 8114 8110 32368
53
CHAPTER 7. MANAGING POWER CONSUMPTION WITH

POWERTOP
As a system administrator, you can use the PowerTOP tool to analyze and manage power consumption.
7.1. THE PURPOSE OF POWERTOP

PowerTOP is a program that diagnoses issues related to power consumption and provides suggestions
on how to extend battery lifetime.
The PowerTOP tool can provide an estimate of the total power usage of the system and also individual
power usage for each process, device, kernel worker, timer, and interrupt handler. The tool can also
identify specific components of kernel and user-space applications that frequently wake up the CPU.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 uses version 2.x of PowerTOP.
7.2. USING POWERTOP
7.2.1. Prerequisites
To be able to use PowerTOP, make sure that the powertop package has been installed on your
system:
# yum install powertop
7.2.2. Starting PowerTOP

Procedure
To run PowerTOP, use the following command:
# powertop
IMPORTANT
Laptops should run on battery power when running the powertop command.
7.2.3. Calibrating PowerTOP

Procedure
1. On a laptop, you can calibrate the power estimation engine by running the following command:
# powertop --calibrate
2. Let the calibration finish without interacting with the machine during the process.
Calibration takes time because the process performs various tests, cycles through brightness
levels and switches devices on and off.
3. When the calibration process is completed, PowerTOP starts as normal. Let it run for
approximately an hour to collect data.
When enough data is collected, power estimation figures will be displayed in the first column of
54
CHAPTER 7. MANAGING POWER CONSUMPTION WITH POWERTOP
When enough data is collected, power estimation figures will be displayed in the first column of
the output table.
NOTE
Note that powertop --calibrate can only be used on laptops.
7.2.4. Setting the measuring interval

By default, PowerTOP takes measurements in 20 seconds intervals.
If you want to change this measuring frequency, use the following procedure:
Procedure
Run the powertop command with the --time option:
# powertop --time=time in seconds
7.2.5. Related information

For more details on how to use PowerTOP, see the powertop man page.
7.3. POWERTOP STATISTICS

While it runs, PowerTOP gathers statistics from the system.
PowerTOP's output provides multiple tabs:
Overview
Idle stats
Frequency stats
Device stats
Tunables
You can use the Tab and Shift+Tab keys to cycle through these tabs.
7.3.1. The Overview tab

In the Overview tab, you can view a list of the components that either send wakeups to the CPU most
frequently or consume the most power. The items within the Overview tab, including processes,
interrupts, devices, and other resources, are sorted according to their utilization.
The adjacent columns within the Overview tab provide the following pieces of information:
Usage
Power estimation of how the resource is being used.
Events/s
Wakeups per second. The number of wakeups per second indicates how efficiently the services or
55
Wakeups per second. The number of wakeups per second indicates how efficiently the services or
the devices and drivers of the kernel are performing. Less wakeups means that less power is
consumed. Components are ordered by how much further their power usage can be optimized.
Category
Classification of the component; such as process, device, or timer.
Description
Description of the component.
If properly calibrated, a power consumption estimation for every listed item in the first column is shown
as well.
Apart from this, the Overview tab includes the line with summary statistics such as:
Total power consumption
Remaining battery life (only if applicable)
Summary of total wakeups per second, GPU operations per second, and virtual file system
operations per second
7.3.2. The Idle stats tab

The Idle stats tab shows usage of C-states for all processors and cores, while the Frequency stats tab
shows usage of P-states including the Turbo mode, if applicable, for all processors and cores. The
duration of C- or P-states is an indication of how well the CPU usage has been optimized. The longer
the CPU stays in the higher C- or P-states (for example C4 is higher than C3), the better the CPU
usage optimization is. Ideally, residency is 90% or more in the highest C- or P-state when the system is
idle.
7.3.3. The Device stats tab

The Device stats tab provides similar information to the Overview tab but only for devices.
7.3.4. The Tunables tab

The Tunables tab contains PowerTOP's suggestions for optimizing the system for lower power
consumption.
Use the up and down keys to move through suggestions, and the enter key to toggle the suggestion on
or off.
Figure 7.1. PowerTOP output
56
CHAPTER 7. MANAGING POWER CONSUMPTION WITH POWERTOP
For more details on PowerTOP, see PowerTOP’s home page.
7.4. GENERATING AN HTML OUTPUT

Apart from the powertop’s output in terminal, you can also generate an HTML report.
Procedure
Run the powertop command with the --html option:
# powertop --html=htmlfile.html
Replace the htmlfile.html parameter with the required name for the output file.
7.5. OPTIMIZING POWER CONSUMPTION

To optimize power consumption, you can use either the powertop service or the powertop2tuned
utility.
7.5.1. Optimizing power consumption using the powertop service

You can use the powertop service to automatically enable all PowerTOP's suggestions from the
Tunables tab on the boot:
Procedure
Enable the powertop service:
# systemctl enable powertop
7.5.2. The powertop2tuned utility

The powertop2tuned utility allows you to create custom Tuned profiles from PowerTOP suggestions.
By default, powertop2tuned creates profiles in the /etc/tuned/ directory, and bases the custom profile
on the currently selected Tuned profile. For safety reasons, all PowerTOP tunings are initially disabled
in the new profile.
To enable the tunings, you can:
Uncomment them in the /etc/tuned/profile_name/tuned.conf file.
Use the --enable or -e option to generate a new profile that enables most of the tunings
suggested by PowerTOP.
Certain potentially problematic tunings, such as the USB autosuspend, are disabled by default
and need to be uncommented manually.
7.5.3. Optimizing power consumption using the powertop2tuned utility

Prerequisites
The powertop2tuned utility is installed on the system:
57
# yum install tuned-utils
Procedure
1. Create a custom profile:
# powertop2tuned new_profile_name
2. Activate the new profile:
# tuned-adm profile new_profile_name
Additional information
For a complete list of options that powertop2tuned supports, use:
$ powertop2tuned --help
7.5.4. Comparison of powertop.service and powertop2tuned

Optimizing power consumption with powertop2tuned is preferred over powertop.service for the
following reasons:
The powertop2tuned utility represents integration of PowerTOP into Tuned, which enables to
benefit of advantages of both tools.
The powertop2tuned utility allows for fine-grained control of enabled tuning.
With powertop2tuned, potentially dangerous tuning are not automatically enabled.
With powertop2tuned, rollback is possible without reboot.
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8

Monitoring and managing system status and

Optimizing system throughput, latency, and power consumption

Last Updated: 2019-09-20

Java ® is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates.

All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

6.3.1. Tuning block I/O in virtual machines 41

7.5.4. Comparison of powertop.service and powertop2tuned 58

PROVIDING FEEDBACK ON RED HAT DOCUMENTATION

For submitting more complex feedback, create a Bugzilla ticket:

1. Go to the Bugzilla website.

2. As the Component, use Documentation.

4. Click Submit Bug.

CHAPTER 1. GETTING STARTED WITH TUNED

1.1. THE PURPOSE OF TUNED

1.2. TUNED PROFILES

Low latency for storage and network

High throughput for storage and network

Virtual machine performance

Virtualization host performance

The default profile

Environment Default profile Goal

Compute nodes throughput-performance The best throughput performance

Environment Default profile Goal

Virtual machines virtual-guest The best performance. If you are not

Other cases balanced Balanced performance and power

Example 1.1. Low power consumption in a virtual guest

# tuned-adm profile virtual-guest powersave

Merging is done automatically without checking whether the resulting combination

The location of profiles

The syntax of profile configuration

Lines starting with the hash sign (#) are comments.

The tuned.conf(5) man page.

1.3. TUNED PROFILES DISTRIBUTED WITH RHEL

There might be more product-specific or third-party Tuned profiles available. Such

That is why the balanced profile can be generally a better option.

The following real-time profiles are available:

1.4. STATIC AND DYNAMIC TUNING IN TUNED

Example 1.2. Static and dynamic tuning on a workstation

1.5. TUNED NO-DAEMON MODE

Rollback support for settings

1.6. INSTALLING AND ENABLING TUNED

1. Install the tuned package:

# yum install tuned

2. Enable and start the tuned service:

# systemctl enable --now tuned

3. Optionally, install Tuned profiles for real-time systems:

# yum install tuned-profiles-realtime tuned-profiles-nfv

4. Verify that a Tuned profile is active and applied:

Current active profile: balanced

Verfication succeeded, current system settings match the preset profile.

1.7. LISTING AVAILABLE TUNED PROFILES

To list all available Tuned profiles on your system, use:

consumption, focused on low latency network performance

To display only the currently active profile, use:

Current active profile: balanced

The tuned-adm(8) man page.

1.8. SETTING A TUNED PROFILE

# tuned-adm profile selected-profile