On Wednesday 06 October 2004 10:59 am, Scot L. Harris wrote: > On Wed, 2004-10-06 at 10:36, Wayne Leutwyler wrote: > > Quick question. > > > > Would I see any performance benefits from building my own custom kernel? > > One of the things I see is that the stock kernel is set for a Pentium II, > > but since this machine I am using is a Pentium III, I was wondering if > > that would give me any benefit. Also I try on turn off things I know I > > wont need on this PC. > > Any kind of performance tuning should start with analyzing what you are > using the machine for and spending the time to identify where most of > your resources are being spent. > > Simply jumping in and frobbing the knobs is generally not good > practice. In most cases it will adversely affect your systems > performance instead of improving it. > > And the kernel is probably the last item to work when optimizing a > system. Again it really depends on what it is you are trying to improve > performance of. For a heavy duty database server you will probably get > more benefit by tweaking the queries or setting up proper keys. For a > network application you may want to adjust window size or some of the > other network parameters. If a particular application is slow doing > certain calculations it may need to be re-written using a different > algorithm. If you are reading and writing huge files you might need to > use a different type of file system that optimizes that kind of function > or use higher speed disk drives. > > So until you really analyze what specific performance criteria you are > trying to improve messing with the kernel is a blind alley at best and > at worst you could decrease performance of most things on your system. > > -- > Scot L. Harris > webid@xxxxxxxxxx > > The absence of labels [in ECL] is probably a good thing. > -- T. Cheatham Thanks Scot these are all good points. There is no real machine I am doing this on, its more of something I was wondering. Maybe I did not ask my question correctly. Are there any benefits from building a custom kernel, aside from a smaller kernel and smaller modules foot print. -- Wayne Leutwyler, RHCT Sys Admin / DBA Columbus, OH. USA
