Motorola Software Group

The performance of Linux servers running in mission-critical environments such as telecommunication net-works is a critical attribute. Its importance is growing due to incorporated high availability approaches, espe-cially for servers requiring five and six nines availability. With the growing number of requirements that Linux servers must meet in areas of performance, security, re-liability, and serviceability, it is becoming a difficult task to optimize all the architecture layers and parameters to meet the user needs. Other Linux servers, those not operating in a mission-critical environment, also require different approaches to optimization to meet specific constraints of their op-erating environment, such as traffic type and intensity, types of calculations, memory, and CPU and IO use. This paper proposes and discusses the design and imple-mentation of a tool called the Performance and Avail-ability Characterization tool, PAC for short, which op-erates with over 150 system parameters to optimize over 50 performance characteristics. The paper discusses the PAC tool’s architecture, multi-parametric analysis algo-rithms, and application areas. Furthermore, the paper presents possible future work to improve the tool and ex-tend it to cover additional system parameters and char-acteristics.