This book is arranged into a few major sections. This will allow you to read the sections of the book that apply to the kind of tuning you want to do.
Fundamentals
What is the nature of performance tuning? How should you go about looking at an entire system in terms of improving the services it provides to others? What common strategies are available? We will go through the basics of performance tuning in detail for this chapter.
Measuring performance
This chapter will deal with measuring performance from a system on various levels, outling common tools bundled with your Linux system or available on the Internet. Once you know how fast your system is in its current state, you have a baseline to measure against.
Disk
This section will compare various kinds of permanent storage. We'll take a look at hard drives, how to write to them, and any tradeoffs between reliability and raw speed.
Kernel
This section will cover some of the popular kernels that are available and how you can use the built in tools to tune it for maximum performance. We'll cover things like the /proc directory, sysctl, and recompiling kernels.
Network
There are a variety of networking schemes, and one will fit your need. Even once you have chosen your networking method, there are ways of enhancing it for even better performance.
Applications
This section is not strictly about Linux, but poorly configured applications can quickly erode any advantages from other tuning methods. We will take a look at tuning various web servers, database applications, and cluster software.