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TUNING(7)		 Miscellaneous Information Manual	       TUNING(7)

NAME
     tuning -- performance tuning under FreeBSD

SYSTEM SETUP - DISKLABEL, NEWFS, TUNEFS, SWAP
     When  using  bsdlabel(8) or sysinstall(8) to lay out your file systems on a
     hard disk it is important to remember that hard drives  can  transfer  data
     much  more  quickly  from outer tracks than they can from inner tracks.  To
     take advantage of this you should try to pack your smaller file systems and
     swap closer to the outer tracks, follow with the larger file  systems,  and
     end  with	the  largest  file systems.  It is also important to size system
     standard file systems such that you will not be forced to resize them later
     as you scale the machine up.  I usually create, in order, a 128M  root,  1G
     swap,  128M  /var,  128M /var/tmp, 3G /usr, and use any remaining space for
     /home.

     You should typically size your swap space to approximately 2x main  memory.
     If you do not have a lot of RAM, though, you will generally want a lot more
     swap.   It is not recommended that you configure any less than 256M of swap
     on a system and you should keep in mind future memory expansion when sizing
     the swap partition.  The kernel's VM paging algorithms are tuned to perform
     best when there is at least 2x swap versus main  memory.	Configuring  too
     little swap can lead to inefficiencies in the VM page scanning code as well
     as create issues later on if you add more memory to your machine.	Finally,
     on larger systems with multiple SCSI disks (or multiple IDE disks operating
     on different controllers), we strongly recommend that you configure swap on
     each  drive.  The swap partitions on the drives should be approximately the
     same size.  The kernel can handle arbitrary sizes but internal data  struc-
     tures scale to 4 times the largest swap partition.  Keeping the swap parti-
     tions  near  the  same  size will allow the kernel to optimally stripe swap
     space across the N disks.	Do not worry about overdoing it a  little,  swap
     space  is the saving grace of Unix and even if you do not normally use much
     swap, it can give you more time to recover from a	runaway  program  before
     being forced to reboot.

     How  you size your /var partition depends heavily on what you intend to use
     the machine for.  This partition is primarily used to hold  mailboxes,  the
     print  spool, and log files.  Some people even make /var/log its own parti-
     tion (but except for extreme cases it is not worth the waste of a partition
     ID).  If your machine is intended to act as a mail or print server, or  you
     are  running  a  heavily visited web server, you should consider creating a
     much larger partition - perhaps a gig or more.  It is very easy to underes-
     timate log file storage requirements.

     Sizing /var/tmp depends on the kind of temporary file usage you  think  you
     will  need.   128M  is the minimum we recommend.  Also note that sysinstall
     will create a /tmp directory.  Dedicating a partition  for  temporary  file
     storage  is important for two reasons: first, it reduces the possibility of
     file system corruption in a crash, and second it reduces the  chance  of  a
     runaway process that fills up [/var]/tmp from blowing up more critical sub-
     systems (mail, logging, etc).  Filling up [/var]/tmp is a very common prob-
     lem to have.

     In  the  old days there were differences between /tmp and /var/tmp, but the
     introduction of /var (and /var/tmp) led to  massive  confusion  by  program
     writers so today programs haphazardly use one or the other and thus no real
     distinction  can  be  made between the two.  So it makes sense to have just
     one temporary directory and softlink to it from the other tmp directory lo-
     cations.  However you handle /tmp, the one thing you do not want to  do  is
     leave it sitting on the root partition where it might cause root to fill up
     or possibly corrupt root in a crash/reboot situation.

     The /usr partition holds the bulk of the files required to support the sys-
     tem  and  a  subdirectory within it called /usr/local holds the bulk of the
     files installed from the ports(7) hierarchy.  If you do not use  ports  all
     that  much  and  do  not intend to keep system source (/usr/src) on the ma-
     chine, you can get away with a 1 gigabyte /usr partition.	However, if  you
     install a lot of ports (especially window managers and Linux-emulated bina-
     ries),  we  recommend  at least a 2 gigabyte /usr and if you also intend to
     keep system source on the machine, we recommend a 3 gigabyte /usr.  Do  not
     underestimate  the  amount of space you will need in this partition, it can
     creep up and surprise you!

     The /home partition is typically used to hold user-specific data.	 I  usu-
     ally size it to the remainder of the disk.

     Why  partition at all?  Why not create one big / partition and be done with
     it?  Then I do not have to worry about undersizing things!  Well, there are
     several reasons this is not a good idea.  First, each partition has differ-
     ent operational characteristics and separating them allows the file  system
     to  tune  itself  to those characteristics.  For example, the root and /usr
     partitions are read-mostly, with very little writing, while a lot of  read-
     ing and writing could occur in /var and /var/tmp.	By properly partitioning
     your  system  fragmentation  introduced  in the smaller more heavily write-
     loaded partitions will not bleed over into the mostly-read partitions.  Ad-
     ditionally, keeping the write-loaded partitions closer to the edge  of  the
     disk (i.e., before the really big partitions instead of after in the parti-
     tion  table) will increase I/O performance in the partitions where you need
     it the most.  Now it is true that you might also need  I/O  performance  in
     the  larger  partitions,  but they are so large that shifting them more to-
     wards the edge of the disk will not lead to a significant	performance  im-
     provement whereas moving /var to the edge can have a huge impact.	Finally,
     there  are safety concerns.  Having a small neat root partition that is es-
     sentially read-only gives it a greater chance of surviving a bad crash  in-
     tact.

     Properly  partitioning  your  system  also allows you to tune newfs(8), and
     tunefs(8) parameters.  Tuning newfs(8) requires  more  experience	but  can
     lead  to  significant improvements in performance.  There are three parame-
     ters that	are  relatively  safe  to  tune:  blocksize,  bytes/i-node,  and
     cylinders/group.

     FreeBSD  performs	best  when using 8K or 16K file system block sizes.  The
     default file system block size is 16K, which provides best performance  for
     most  applications,  with the exception of those that perform random access
     on large files (such as database server software).  Such applications  tend
     to  perform  better with a smaller block size, although modern disk charac-
     teristics are such that the performance gain from	using  a  smaller  block
     size  may	not  be worth consideration.  Using a block size larger than 16K
     can cause fragmentation of the buffer cache and lead to lower performance.

     The defaults may be unsuitable for a file system that requires a very large
     number of i-nodes or is intended to hold  a  large  number  of  very  small
     files.   Such  a file system should be created with an 8K or 4K block size.
     This also requires you to specify a smaller fragment  size.   We  recommend
     always  using  a fragment size that is 1/8 the block size (less testing has
     been done on other fragment size factors).  The newfs(8) options  for  this
     would be "newfs -f 1024 -b 8192 ...".

     If  a  large  partition is intended to be used to hold fewer, larger files,
     such as database files, you can increase the bytes/i-node ratio  which  re-
     duces  the  number of i-nodes (maximum number of files and directories that
     can be created) for that partition.  Decreasing the number of i-nodes in  a
     file  system  can	greatly reduce fsck(8) recovery times after a crash.  Do
     not use this option unless you are actually storing large files on the par-
     tition, because if you overcompensate you can wind up with  a  file  system
     that  has	lots  of  free	space  remaining but cannot accommodate any more
     files.  Using 32768, 65536, or 262144 bytes/i-node is recommended.  You can
     go higher but it will have only incremental  effects  on  fsck(8)	recovery
     times.  For example, "newfs -i 32768 ...".

     tunefs(8)	may  be used to further tune a file system.  This command can be
     run in single-user mode without having to reformat the file  system.   How-
     ever,  this is possibly the most abused program in the system.  Many people
     attempt to increase available file system space  by  setting  the	min-free
     percentage  to 0.	This can lead to severe file system fragmentation and we
     do not recommend that you do this.  Really the only tunefs(8) option worth-
     while here is turning on softupdates with "tunefs -n  enable  /filesystem".
     (Note:  in FreeBSD 4.5 and later, softupdates can be turned on using the -U
     option to newfs(8), and sysinstall(8) will typically enable softupdates au-
     tomatically for non-root file systems).  Softupdates  drastically	improves
     meta-data performance, mainly file creation and deletion.	We recommend en-
     abling softupdates on most file systems; however, there are two limitations
     to  softupdates that you should be aware of when determining whether to use
     it on a file system.  First, softupdates guarantees file system consistency
     in the case of a crash but could very easily be  several  seconds	(even  a
     minute!)  behind  on  pending write to the physical disk.	If you crash you
     may lose more work than otherwise.  Secondly, softupdates delays the  free-
     ing  of  file  system  blocks.  If you have a file system (such as the root
     file system) which is close to full, doing a major update of it, e.g. "make
     installworld", can run it out of space and cause the update to  fail.   For
     this reason, softupdates will not be enabled on the root file system during
     a	typical  install.   There  is no loss of performance since the root file
     system is rarely written to.

     A number of run-time mount(8) options exist that can help you tune the sys-
     tem.  The most obvious and most dangerous one is async.  Do  not  ever  use
     it; it is far too dangerous.  A less dangerous and more useful mount(8) op-
     tion  is  called  noatime.   Unix file systems normally update the last-ac-
     cessed time of a file or directory whenever it is accessed.  This operation
     is handled in FreeBSD with a delayed write and normally does not  create  a
     burden  on  the system.  However, if your system is accessing a huge number
     of files on a continuing basis the buffer cache can wind  up  getting  pol-
     luted with atime updates, creating a burden on the system.  For example, if
     you  are  running	a heavily loaded web site, or a news server with lots of
     readers, you might want to consider  turning  off	atime  updates	on  your
     larger  partitions with this mount(8) option.  However, you should not gra-
     tuitously turn off atime updates everywhere.  For example,  the  /var  file
     system  customarily  holds mailboxes, and atime (in combination with mtime)
     is used to determine whether a mailbox has new mail.   You  might	as  well
     leave atime turned on for mostly read-only partitions such as / and /usr as
     well.   This is especially useful for / since some system utilities use the
     atime field for reporting.

STRIPING DISKS
     In larger systems you can stripe partitions from several drives together to
     create a much larger overall partition.  Striping can also improve the per-
     formance of a file system by splitting I/O operations across  two	or  more
     disks.   The vinum(8) and ccdconfig(8) utilities may be used to create sim-
     ple striped file systems.	Generally speaking, striping smaller  partitions
     such  as the root and /var/tmp, or essentially read-only partitions such as
     /usr is a complete waste of time.	You should only stripe	partitions  that
     require  serious  I/O  performance, typically /var, /home, or custom parti-
     tions used to hold databases and web pages.   Choosing  the  proper  stripe
     size is also important.  File systems tend to store meta-data on power-of-2
     boundaries  and  you  usually  want  to reduce seeking rather than increase
     seeking.  This means you want to use a large off-center stripe size such as
     1152 sectors so sequential I/O does not seek both disks and so meta-data is
     distributed across both disks rather than concentrated on	a  single  disk.
     If you really need to get sophisticated, we recommend using a real hardware
     RAID controller from the list of FreeBSD supported controllers.

SYSCTL TUNING
     sysctl(8)	variables  permit system behavior to be monitored and controlled
     at run-time.  Some sysctls simply report on the  behavior	of  the  system;
     others  allow  the  system behavior to be modified; some may be set at boot
     time using rc.conf(5), but most will be set via sysctl.conf(5).  There  are
     several  hundred  sysctls	in  the system, including many that appear to be
     candidates for tuning but actually are not.  In this document we will  only
     cover the ones that have the greatest effect on the system.

     The  kern.ipc.shm_use_phys  sysctl  defaults to 0 (off) and may be set to 0
     (off) or 1 (on).  Setting this parameter to  1  will  cause  all  System  V
     shared  memory segments to be mapped to unpageable physical RAM.  This fea-
     ture only has an effect if you are either	(A)  mapping  small  amounts  of
     shared  memory  across  many  (hundreds) of processes, or (B) mapping large
     amounts of shared memory across any number of processes.  This feature  al-
     lows  the kernel to remove a great deal of internal memory management page-
     tracking overhead at the cost of wiring the shared memory into core, making
     it unswappable.

     The vfs.vmiodirenable sysctl defaults to 1 (on).  This  parameter	controls
     how  directories  are cached by the system.  Most directories are small and
     use but a single fragment (typically 1K) in the file system and  even  less
     (typically  512 bytes) in the buffer cache.  However, when operating in the
     default mode the buffer cache will only cache a fixed number of directories
     even if you have a huge amount of memory.	Turning on  this  sysctl  allows
     the  buffer  cache  to use the VM Page Cache to cache the directories.  The
     advantage is that all of memory is now available for  caching  directories.
     The  disadvantage is that the minimum in-core memory used to cache a direc-
     tory is the physical page size (typically 4K) rather than	512  bytes.   We
     recommend	turning this option off in memory-constrained environments; how-
     ever, when on, it will substantially improve the  performance  of	services
     that  manipulate  a  large  number of files.  Such services can include web
     caches, large mail systems, and news systems.  Turning on this option  will
     generally not reduce performance even with the wasted memory but you should
     experiment to find out.

     The vfs.write_behind sysctl defaults to 1 (on).  This tells the file system
     to  issue	media writes as full clusters are collected, which typically oc-
     curs when writing large sequential files.	The idea is to avoid  saturating
     the  buffer  cache with dirty buffers when it would not benefit I/O perfor-
     mance.  However, this may stall processes and under  certain  circumstances
     you may wish to turn it off.

     The vfs.hirunningspace sysctl determines how much outstanding write I/O may
     be  queued  to disk controllers system-wide at any given instance.  The de-
     fault is usually sufficient but on machines with lots of disks you may want
     to bump it up to four or five megabytes.  Note  that  setting  too  high  a
     value  (exceeding the buffer cache's write threshold) can lead to extremely
     bad clustering performance.  Do not set this value arbitrarily high!  Also,
     higher write queueing values may add latency to reads occurring at the same
     time.

     There are various other buffer-cache and VM page cache related sysctls.  We
     do not recommend modifying these values.  As of FreeBSD 4.3, the VM  system
     does an extremely good job tuning itself.

     The  net.inet.tcp.sendspace  and net.inet.tcp.recvspace sysctls are of par-
     ticular interest if you are running network intensive  applications.   They
     control  the  amount of send and receive buffer space allowed for any given
     TCP connection.  The default sending buffer is 32K; the  default  receiving
     buffer  is  64K.  You can often improve bandwidth utilization by increasing
     the default at the cost of eating up more kernel memory  for  each  connec-
     tion.   We do not recommend increasing the defaults if you are serving hun-
     dreds or thousands of simultaneous connections because it	is  possible  to
     quickly  run  the	system out of memory due to stalled connections building
     up.  But if you need high bandwidth over a fewer number of connections, es-
     pecially if you have gigabit Ethernet, increasing these defaults can make a
     huge difference.  You can adjust the buffer size for incoming and	outgoing
     data separately.  For example, if your machine is primarily doing web serv-
     ing  you may want to decrease the recvspace in order to be able to increase
     the sendspace without eating too much kernel memory.  Note that the routing
     table (see route(8)) can be used to introduce route-specific send	and  re-
     ceive buffer size defaults.

     As  an  additional management tool you can use pipes in your firewall rules
     (see ipfw(8)) to limit the bandwidth going to or from particular IP  blocks
     or  ports.   For example, if you have a T1 you might want to limit your web
     traffic to 70% of the T1's bandwidth in order to leave the remainder avail-
     able for mail and interactive use.  Normally a heavily  loaded  web  server
     will  not	introduce  significant latencies into other services even if the
     network link is maxed out, but enforcing a limit can smooth things out  and
     lead  to  longer term stability.  Many people also enforce artificial band-
     width limitations in order to ensure that they are not  charged  for  using
     too much bandwidth.

     Setting the send or receive TCP buffer to values larger than 65535 will re-
     sult  in  a  marginal performance improvement unless both hosts support the
     window scaling extension of the TCP protocol, which is  controlled  by  the
     net.inet.tcp.rfc1323  sysctl.   These  extensions should be enabled and the
     TCP buffer size should be set to a value larger than 65536 in order to  ob-
     tain  good  performance  from certain types of network links; specifically,
     gigabit WAN links and high-latency satellite links.  RFC1323 support is en-
     abled by default.

     The net.inet.tcp.always_keepalive sysctl determines whether or not the  TCP
     implementation  should  attempt to detect dead TCP connections by intermit-
     tently delivering "keepalives" on the connection.	By default, this is  en-
     abled  for all applications; by setting this sysctl to 0, only applications
     that specifically request keepalives will use them.  In most  environments,
     TCP keepalives will improve the management of system state by expiring dead
     TCP  connections, particularly for systems serving dialup users who may not
     always terminate individual TCP connections before disconnecting  from  the
     network.	However,  in some environments, temporary network outages may be
     incorrectly identified as dead sessions, resulting in  unexpectedly  termi-
     nated  TCP  connections.  In such environments, setting the sysctl to 0 may
     reduce the occurrence of TCP session disconnections.

     The net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack TCP feature is largely misunderstood.  Histor-
     ically speaking, this feature was designed to allow the acknowledgement  to
     transmitted data to be returned along with the response.  For example, when
     you type over a remote shell, the acknowledgement to the character you send
     can be returned along with the data representing the echo of the character.
     With  delayed  acks  turned off, the acknowledgement may be sent in its own
     packet, before the remote service has a chance to echo the data it just re-
     ceived.  This same concept also applies to any interactive  protocol  (e.g.
     SMTP, WWW, POP3), and can cut the number of tiny packets flowing across the
     network  in  half.  The FreeBSD delayed ACK implementation also follows the
     TCP protocol rule that at least every other packet be acknowledged even  if
     the  standard  100ms  timeout has not yet passed.	Normally the worst a de-
     layed ACK can do is  slightly  delay  the	teardown  of  a  connection,  or
     slightly  delay  the  ramp-up of a slow-start TCP connection.  While we are
     not sure we believe that the several FAQs related to packages such as SAMBA
     and SQUID which advise turning off delayed acks may  be  referring  to  the
     slow-start  issue.  In FreeBSD, it would be more beneficial to increase the
     slow-start  flightsize  via  the  net.inet.tcp.slowstart_flightsize  sysctl
     rather than disable delayed acks.

     The  net.inet.tcp.inflight.enable	sysctl	turns on bandwidth delay product
     limiting for all TCP connections.	The system will attempt to calculate the
     bandwidth delay product for each connection and limit the	amount	of  data
     queued  to  the  network  to  just  the amount required to maintain optimum
     throughput.  This feature is useful if you are serving  data  over  modems,
     GigE,  or high speed WAN links (or any other link with a high bandwidth*de-
     lay product), especially if you are also using window scaling or have  con-
     figured a large send window.  If you enable this option, you should also be
     sure  to  set net.inet.tcp.inflight.debug to 0 (disable debugging), and for
     production use setting net.inet.tcp.inflight.min to at least  6144  may  be
     beneficial.   Note however, that setting high minimums may effectively dis-
     able bandwidth limiting depending on the link.  The  limiting  feature  re-
     duces  the amount of data built up in intermediate router and switch packet
     queues as well as reduces the amount of data built up in the  local  host's
     interface	queue.	 With  fewer packets queued up, interactive connections,
     especially over slow modems, will also be able to operate with lower  round
     trip times.  However, note that this feature only affects data transmission
     (uploading  /  server-side).   It does not affect data reception (download-
     ing).

     Adjusting net.inet.tcp.inflight.stab is not  recommended.	 This  parameter
     defaults to 20, representing 2 maximal packets added to the bandwidth delay
     product window calculation.  The additional window is required to stabilize
     the algorithm and improve responsiveness to changing conditions, but it can
     also  result  in higher ping times over slow links (though still much lower
     than you would get without the inflight algorithm).  In such cases you  may
     wish  to try reducing this parameter to 15, 10, or 5, and you may also have
     to reduce net.inet.tcp.inflight.min (for example, to 3500) to get	the  de-
     sired  effect.   Reducing	these parameters should be done as a last resort
     only.

     The net.inet.ip.portrange.* sysctls control the port number ranges automat-
     ically bound to TCP and UDP sockets.  There are three ranges: a low  range,
     a default range, and a high range, selectable via the IP_PORTRANGE setsock-
     opt(2)  call.   Most  network  programs use the default range which is con-
     trolled  by  net.inet.ip.portrange.first  and   net.inet.ip.portrange.last,
     which default to 49152 and 65535, respectively.  Bound port ranges are used
     for outgoing connections, and it is possible to run the system out of ports
     under  certain  circumstances.  This most commonly occurs when you are run-
     ning a heavily loaded web proxy.  The port range is not an issue when  run-
     ning  a  server which handles mainly incoming connections, such as a normal
     web server, or has a limited number of outgoing connections, such as a mail
     relay.  For situations where you may run out of  ports,  we  recommend  de-
     creasing  net.inet.ip.portrange.first  modestly.  A range of 10000 to 30000
     ports may be reasonable.  You should also consider  firewall  effects  when
     changing  the  port  range.  Some firewalls may block large ranges of ports
     (usually low-numbered ports) and expect systems to  use  higher  ranges  of
     ports  for  outgoing connections.	By default net.inet.ip.portrange.last is
     set at the maximum allowable port number.

     The kern.ipc.somaxconn sysctl limits the size of the listen queue	for  ac-
     cepting new TCP connections.  The default value of 128 is typically too low
     for robust handling of new connections in a heavily loaded web server envi-
     ronment.  For such environments, we recommend increasing this value to 1024
     or higher.  The service daemon may itself limit the listen queue size (e.g.
     sendmail(8),  apache)  but will often have a directive in its configuration
     file to adjust the queue size up.	Larger listen queues also  do  a  better
     job of fending off denial of service attacks.

     The  kern.maxfiles  sysctl  determines  how many open files the system sup-
     ports.  The default is typically a few thousand but you may  need	to  bump
     this up to ten or twenty thousand if you are running databases or large de-
     scriptor-heavy  daemons.  The read-only kern.openfiles sysctl may be inter-
     rogated to determine the current number of open files on the system.

     The vm.swap_idle_enabled sysctl is useful in large multi-user systems where
     you have lots of users entering and leaving the system  and  lots	of  idle
     processes.   Such systems tend to generate a great deal of continuous pres-
     sure on free memory reserves.  Turning this feature on  and  adjusting  the
     swapout  hysteresis  (in  idle  seconds)  via  vm.swap_idle_threshold1  and
     vm.swap_idle_threshold2 allows you to depress the priority of pages associ-
     ated with idle processes more quickly then the  normal  pageout  algorithm.
     This  gives  a helping hand to the pageout daemon.  Do not turn this option
     on unless you need it, because the tradeoff you are  making  is  to  essen-
     tially  pre-page memory sooner rather than later, eating more swap and disk
     bandwidth.  In a small system this option will have  a  detrimental  effect
     but in a large system that is already doing moderate paging this option al-
     lows  the	VM  system  to stage whole processes into and out of memory more
     easily.

LOADER TUNABLES
     Some aspects of the system behavior may not be tunable at	runtime  because
     memory  allocations  they perform must occur early in the boot process.  To
     change loader tunables, you must set their values in loader.conf(5) and re-
     boot the system.

     kern.maxusers controls the scaling of a number of static system tables, in-
     cluding defaults for the maximum number of open files,  sizing  of  network
     memory  resources,  etc.  As of FreeBSD 4.5, kern.maxusers is automatically
     sized at boot based on the amount of memory available in  the  system,  and
     may  be  determined  at  run-time	by inspecting the value of the read-only
     kern.maxusers sysctl.  Some sites will require larger or smaller values  of
     kern.maxusers  and  may  set it as a loader tunable; values of 64, 128, and
     256 are not uncommon.  We do not recommend going above 256 unless you  need
     a	huge number of file descriptors; many of the tunable values set to their
     defaults by kern.maxusers may be individually overridden  at  boot-time  or
     run-time  as  described  elsewhere  in  this  document.  Systems older than
     FreeBSD 4.4 must set this value via the kernel  config(8)	option	maxusers
     instead.

     kern.ipc.nmbclusters  may	be  adjusted  to  increase the number of network
     mbufs the system is willing to allocate.  Each cluster represents	approxi-
     mately  2K of memory, so a value of 1024 represents 2M of kernel memory re-
     served for network buffers.  You can do a simple calculation to figure  out
     how many you need.  If you have a web server which maxes out at 1000 simul-
     taneous  connections,  and  each connection eats a 16K receive and 16K send
     buffer, you need approximately 32MB worth of network buffers to  deal  with
     it.  A good rule of thumb is to multiply by 2, so 32MBx2 = 64MB/2K = 32768.
     So  for  this case you would want to set kern.ipc.nmbclusters to 32768.  We
     recommend values between 1024 and 4096 for machines with  moderates  amount
     of  memory, and between 4096 and 32768 for machines with greater amounts of
     memory.  Under no circumstances should  you  specify  an  arbitrarily  high
     value  for  this parameter, it could lead to a boot-time crash.  The -m op-
     tion to netstat(1) may be used to observe network cluster use.  Older  ver-
     sions  of FreeBSD do not have this tunable and require that the kernel con-
     fig(8) option NMBCLUSTERS be set instead.

     More and more programs are using the sendfile(2) system  call  to	transmit
     files over the network.  The kern.ipc.nsfbufs sysctl controls the number of
     file  system  buffers  sendfile(2)  is  allowed to use to perform its work.
     This parameter nominally scales with kern.maxusers so you should  not  need
     to  modify  this  parameter  except  under  extreme circumstances.  See the
     "TUNING" section in the sendfile(2) manual page for details.

KERNEL CONFIG TUNING
     There are a number of kernel options that you may have to fiddle with in  a
     large-scale  system.   In order to change these options you need to be able
     to compile a new kernel from source.  The config(8)  manual  page	and  the
     handbook  are  good starting points for learning how to do this.  Generally
     the first thing you do when creating your own custom kernel is to strip out
     all the drivers and services you do not use.  Removing  things  like  INET6
     and  drivers you do not have will reduce the size of your kernel, sometimes
     by a megabyte or more, leaving more memory available for applications.

     SCSI_DELAY may be used to reduce  system  boot  times.   The  defaults  are
     fairly  high  and	can  be  responsible for 5+ seconds of delay in the boot
     process.  Reducing SCSI_DELAY to something below 5 seconds could work  (es-
     pecially with modern drives).  Reducing IDE_DELAY (only available for PC98)
     also works but you have to be a little more careful.

     There are a number of *_CPU options that can be commented out.  If you only
     want  the	kernel	to  run  on  a	Pentium class CPU, you can easily remove
     I386_CPU and I486_CPU, but only remove I586_CPU if you are sure your CPU is
     being recognized as a Pentium II or better.  Some clones may be  recognized
     as  a  Pentium or even a 486 and not be able to boot without those options.
     If it works, great!  The operating  system  will  be  able  to  better  use
     higher-end  CPU features for MMU, task switching, timebase, and even device
     operations.  Additionally, higher-end CPUs support 4MB MMU pages, which the
     kernel uses to map the kernel itself into memory, increasing its efficiency
     under heavy syscall loads.

IDE WRITE CACHING
     FreeBSD 4.3 flirted with turning off IDE write caching.  This reduced write
     bandwidth to IDE disks but was considered necessary  due  to  serious  data
     consistency issues introduced by hard drive vendors.  Basically the problem
     is  that  IDE  drives  lie  about	when  a write completes.  With IDE write
     caching turned on, IDE hard drives will not only write data to disk out  of
     order,  they  will  sometimes  delay  some of the blocks indefinitely under
     heavy disk load.  A crash or power failure can result in serious file  sys-
     tem corruption.  So our default was changed to be safe.  Unfortunately, the
     result was such a huge loss in performance that we caved in and changed the
     default back to on after the release.  You should check the default on your
     system by observing the hw.ata.wc sysctl variable.  If IDE write caching is
     turned off, you can turn it back on by setting the hw.ata.wc loader tunable
     to 1.  More information on tuning the ATA driver system may be found in the
     ata(4) man page.  If you need performance, go with SCSI.

CPU, MEMORY, DISK, NETWORK
     The  type	of  tuning you do depends heavily on where your system begins to
     bottleneck as load increases.  If your system runs out of CPU  (idle  times
     are  perpetually  0%) then you need to consider upgrading the CPU or moving
     to an SMP motherboard (multiple CPU's), or perhaps you need to revisit  the
     programs  that are causing the load and try to optimize them.  If your sys-
     tem is paging to swap a lot you need to consider adding  more  memory.   If
     your  system  is  saturating the disk you typically see high CPU idle times
     and total disk saturation.  systat(1) can be used to monitor  this.   There
     are  many solutions to saturated disks: increasing memory for caching, mir-
     roring disks, distributing  operations  across  several  machines,  and  so
     forth.   If  disk	performance  is  an  issue and you are using IDE drives,
     switching to SCSI can help a great deal.  While modern IDE  drives  compare
     with  SCSI in raw sequential bandwidth, the moment you start seeking around
     the disk SCSI drives usually win.

     Finally, you might run out of network suds.  The first line of defense  for
     improving	network  performance  is to make sure you are using switches in-
     stead of hubs, especially these days where switches are  almost  as  cheap.
     Hubs  have  severe problems under heavy loads due to collision back-off and
     one bad host can severely degrade the entire  LAN.   Second,  optimize  the
     network  path as much as possible.  For example, in firewall(7) we describe
     a firewall protecting internal hosts with a topology where  the  externally
     visible hosts are not routed through it.  Use 100BaseT rather than 10BaseT,
     or  use 1000BaseT rather than 100BaseT, depending on your needs.  Most bot-
     tlenecks occur at the WAN link (e.g. modem, T1, DSL, whatever).  If expand-
     ing the link is not an option it may be possible  to  use	the  dummynet(4)
     feature to implement peak shaving or other forms of traffic shaping to pre-
     vent  the	overloaded  service  (such as web services) from affecting other
     services (such as email), or vice versa.  In home installations this  could
     be  used to give interactive traffic (your browser, ssh(1) logins) priority
     over services you export from your box (web services, email).

SEE ALSO
     netstat(1),  systat(1),  ata(4),  dummynet(4),  login.conf(5),  rc.conf(5),
     sysctl.conf(5),  firewall(7), hier(7), ports(7), boot(8), bsdlabel(8), ccd-
     config(8), config(8), fsck(8), ifconfig(8), ipfw(8),  loader(8),  mount(8),
     newfs(8), route(8), sysctl(8), sysinstall(8), tunefs(8), vinum(8)

HISTORY
     The  tuning  manual page was originally written by Matthew Dillon and first
     appeared in FreeBSD 4.3, May 2001.

FreeBSD 5.5			  June 25, 2002 		       TUNING(7)

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