performace checking

[Brad Knowles]

At 8:23 AM +0800 8/8/01, Dinesh Singh wrote:

>  what are the commands or tools that I can use to check the performace of the
>  hard disk, network, memory and cpu of a server running dns services in unix.
>  Would "top" be good enough ? Any other commands ?

	It depends on what level you want to check them out.  Tools like 
"sar" can give you a pretty good long-term view of how the system is 
doing, and iostat and vmstat can give you a good interactive view. 
Programs like "top" are rather limited in this regard, because they 
give you a high-level overview, and what you really want is more 
detail than they have space to show you.


	If you want to benchmark your system, you need to choose the part 
you want to benchmark, and then you need to choose the benchmark 
which most closely simulates your real-world environment.

	For disk benchmarks, I'd suggest looking at the list at 
<http://www.acnc.com/benchmarks.html> (I'm rather partial to 
postmark, if you want to get a pretty good idea of what will happen 
with the machine as a mail server).

	For low-level theoretical benchmarks (which do not necessarily 
have much relation to the performance of the system as a whole, but 
measure the absolute performance of a whole lot of various 
subsystems), you probably want to look at lmbench (see 
<http://www.bitmover.com/lmbench/>).

	You may want to look at the Google Directory page at 
<http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Performance_and_Capacity/Benchmarking/> 
for other benchmarks.


	Finally, keep in mind that there are some undocumented DNS 
benchmarking tools that ship with the current Beta test version of 
BIND 9.2.0, and they may help you characterize the performance of 
your nameserver much better.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles at skynet.be>

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