admin/XFS_Performance_Tuning/xfs_performance_tuning.asciidoc

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XFS Performance Tuning
======================
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[preface]
--
_Premature optimization is the root of all evil._ - Donald Knuth

So you want to tune your XFS filesystem for a workload? Think hard about it as
it's difficult to do properly and requires significant knowledge and expertise.
Reading this guide won't make you an optimisation expert, though it might just
help you solve the problem you are facing.
--

Introduction
============

== Overview

This document describes the theory and practice being tuning XFS
for performance. Performance tuning is a mixture of knowledge, process and
observation. The xref:Knowledge[Knowledge Section] will cover aspects of the XFS
configuration space that affect performance and assumes that the reader has some
familiarity with the XFS on-disk structures.

// add document link to XFS Filesystem Structure

The xref:Observation[Observation Section] will demonstrate various tools that
can be used to monitor filesystem performance while workloads are run. Key
performance metrics will be discussed and related back to the structure of the
filesystem and configuration parameters discussed in the
xref:Knowledge[Knowledge Section].

The xref:Process[Process section] will cover the typical processes used to
optimise a filesystem for a given workload. If the workload measurements are not
accurate or reproducable, then no conclusions can be drawn as to whether a
configuration changes an improvemnt or not. Hence without a robust testing
process, no amount of knowledge or observation will result in a well optimised
filesystem configuration.

While reading this document, it is important to keep in mind the fact that
there are relatively few workloads where using non-default mkfs.xfs or mount
options make much sense. In general, the default values already used are
optimised for best performance in the first place. The most common
optimisations are done automatically if possible and hence mostly remove the
need for manual optimisation.

Therefore, you should only consider changing the defaults if either:

* you know from experience that your workload causes XFS a specific problem that
can be worked around via a configuration change, or

* your workload is demonstrating bad performance when using the default
configurations.

In this case, you need to understand why your application is causing bad
performance before you start tweaking XFS configurations. This guide is intended
to help you identify the cause of perofrmance problems and which knobs you can
tweak to avoid or mitigate the problems being observed.


[[Knowledge]]
Knowledge
=========

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// 1. storage layout

// 2. filesystem layout
include::filesystem_layout.asciidoc[]

// 3. tunable filesystem features
include::filesystem_tunables.asciidoc[]

// 4. Understand the workload

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[[Observation]]
Observation
===========

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= TODO

TODO

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[[Process]]
Tuning Processes
================

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= TODO

TODO

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