Linux performance guides for distributions

I'm often asked for the performance guides from Red Hat and SUSE. So here are the links for that: RHEL 6 Performance Tuning Guide SLES 1...Read more »

IBM XL C/C++ for Linux on System z beta program

IBM has launched a beta program for a new compiler for Linux on System z. If you've been working with IBM platforms you may already kno...Read more »

Oprofile on zLinux - how to setup and use

(updated 1/8/2014) Oprofile is a system wide profiler which is available in all major distributions for Linux on System z. Here is the setu...Read more »

New Whitepaper covering IBM Filenet P8 on zLinux

IBM Filenet P8 has been available for zLinux for quite some time. It's a really scalable document management, content lifecycle, and w...Read more »

Updated Whitepaper: WebSphere Application Server - Idle Server Tuning

When running in a virtualized environment like z/VM it's beneficial if the hypervisor knows if a server is idle or not. Usually this is ...Read more »

Large Systems Performance Reference (LSPR) for zLinux

The Large Systems Performance Reference (LSPR) published by IBM has also a Linux workload included. There you can get a first impression o...Read more »

Cheat sheet for lock debugging in the Linux kernel

From time to time I'm getting a performance problems that requires identifying the lock in the Linux kernel that causes too much lock co...Read more »

zlib performance improvements

In my blog entry on RHEL 6.4 I've mentioned that there have been performance enhancements for zlib compression. However I never got aro...Read more »

New white paper: HyperPAV setup with z/VM and Red Hat Linux on zSeries

Parallel Access Volume (PAV)  allow you on System z to have more than one I/O outstanding per volume. However it's not so easy to set up...Read more »

How to limit CPU usage of suspect runaway processes

Have you ever had the problem that a Linux guest under z/VM was using "too much" CPU and when you looked closer you identified a s...Read more »

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.9 released

Red Hat has announced the availability of RHEL 5.9. You can find more information on this here: Announcement Release Notes Technical Notes K...Read more »

Getting mutrace to work on zLinux

Recently I got the question on how to trace mutex contention in libpthread on zLinux. There are several solutions to this Use SystemTap wit...Read more »

DB2 Connect high CPU utilization

DB2 Connect servers are usually a good target for consolidation. Recently we observed relatively high CPU utilization even though only a sm...Read more »

New Whitepaper "Using the Linux cpuplugd Daemon to manage CPU and memory resources from z/VM Linux guests"

CPU and memory resources are normally shared in a virtualized environment. Therefore multiple guests are fighting for the same resources. Be...Read more »

New Whitepaper: "Java Design and Coding for Virtualized Environments"

Ever wondered why your Java application is not running as smooth as it should in a virtualized environment? There are multiple reasons for t...Read more »

Whitepaper update: "Explore Decimal Floating Point support in Linux on System z"

Since a few years no System z offers hardware support for decimal floating point operations as defined by IEEE 754-2008 . This allows for ex...Read more »

New Whitepaper: "WebSphere Application Server Horizontal Versus Vertical JVM Stacking Report"

This new whitepaper addresses the question if one should do a 1:1 consolidation or putting more than one server into a zLinux guest from a ...Read more »

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.8 released

Red Hat has announced the availability of RHEL 5.8. You can find more information on this here: Announcement Release Notes Technical Notes K...Read more »

Gathering performance data with sysstat

The sysstat package is included in all distributions but not always installed by default. It's a collection of performance monitoring t...Read more »

z/VM 6.2 - beyond SSI and LGR

The main features in z/VM 6.2 are certainly Single System Image (SSI) and Live Guest Relocation (LGR). With that it's now possible to h...Read more »