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Performance profiles in Enterprise Linux 8 (tuned-adm)

In the Enterprise Linux 8 family, the tuned program is installed and active by default, which allows you to easily tune the system to the best performance, depending on the chosen usage scenario. Today we will show you how to use it. Command tuned-adm we can switch to one of the available performance profiles, e.g. balanced, […]

In the Enterprise Linux 8 family, the tuned program is installed and active by default, which allows you to easily tune the system to the best performance, depending on the chosen usage scenario. Today we will show you how to use it.

Command tuned-adm we can switch to one of the available performance profiles, e.g. balanced, energy-saving, desktop profile, profiles for virtual machines and virtual machine hosts, profiles increasing performance with an emphasis on low delays, high storage or network bandwidth or profiles specially prepared for Oracle or MS SQL Server databases.

The list of default profiles available in Enterprise Linux 8 (Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux, Oracle Linux, RHEL …) will be displayed with the command tuned-adm with parameter list:

[eurolinux@el84 ~]$ tuned-adm list
Available profiles:
- accelerator-performance     - Throughput performance based tuning with disabled higher latency STOP states
- balanced                    - General non-specialized tuned profile
- desktop                     - Optimize for the desktop use-case
- hpc-compute                 - Optimize for HPC compute workloads
- intel-sst                   - Configure for Intel Speed Select Base Frequency
- latency-performance         - Optimize for deterministic performance at the cost of increased power consumption
- network-latency             - Optimize for deterministic performance at the cost of increased power consumption, focused on low latency network performance
- network-throughput          - Optimize for streaming network throughput, generally only necessary on older CPUs or 40G+ networks
- optimize-serial-console     - Optimize for serial console use.
- powersave                   - Optimize for low power consumption
- throughput-performance      - Broadly applicable tuning that provides excellent performance across a variety of common server workloads
- virtual-guest               - Optimize for running inside a virtual guest
- virtual-host                - Optimize for running KVM guests
Current active profile: virtual-guest

Additional downloadable packages with tuned profiles can be searched using commands dnf search tuned-profiles-* or dnf list tuned-profiles-*:

[eurolinux@el84 ~]$ dnf search tuned-profiles-*
Last metadata expiration check: 0:07:00 ago on Thu 16 Nov 2021 12:02:48 AM CET.
========================= Name Matched: tuned-profiles-* ==========================
tuned-profiles-atomic.noarch : Additional tuned profile(s) targeted to Atomic
tuned-profiles-compat.noarch : Additional tuned profiles mainly for backward
                             : compatibility with tuned 1.0
tuned-profiles-cpu-partitioning.noarch : Additional tuned profile(s) optimized for
                                       : CPU partitioning
tuned-profiles-mssql.noarch : Additional tuned profile(s) for MS SQL Server
tuned-profiles-oracle.noarch : Additional tuned profile(s) targeted to Oracle loads

The profile active in the system will be displayed with a command tuned-adm with parameter active:

[eurolinux@el84 ~]$ tuned-adm active                                                      
Current active profile: virtual-guest

The switch between profiles will be obtained by providing a return in the first parameter profileand in the second new name, selected profile:

[eurolinux@el84 ~]$ sudo tuned-adm profile network-latency
[eurolinux@el84 ~]$ tuned-adm active
Current active profile: network-latency

We can also switch to the profile recommended for our system using the parameter recommend. The recommendation is based on various system characteristics, including on information whether the system is a virtual machine and on options selected during system installation:

[eurolinux@el84 ~]$ sudo tuned-adm profile $(tuned-adm recommend)
[eurolinux@el84 ~]$ tuned-adm active
Current active profile: virtual-guest

Cockpit

We can also visually change the profile in the web application cockpit. To do this, we must first activate this application with the command:

sudo systemctl enable --now cockpit.socket

Then we can open the browser window. In the address bar, after https, enter the IP of the machine on which the system is installed and port 9090. After entering this data into the browser we will see a page with a login window to the system:

Optimizing the Efficiency of EuroLinux

Changes in profiles can only be made by privileged users – this should be remembered at the stage of logging in to the cockpit. After logging in, the system information review screen will be displayed along with the currently used performance profile:

Optimizing the Efficiency of EuroLinux

We can now click the name of the active profile and select any profile in the new window, approving the change with the button Change profile:

Optimizing the Efficiency of EuroLinux

Summary

After additional configuration tuned can dynamically change profiles depending on the system load, responding to the current situation on the server. Profiles provided by distribution are stored in the subdirectory /usr/lib/tunedand user-defined profiles in the subdirectory /etc/tuned. If profiles with the same name are in both places, user-defined profiles have priority over system ones. Creating your own profiles is described in the tuned.conf (5) manual.

In this simple way to change the performance profile, according to the required and imposed machine use scenario, can be made by the user without detailed knowledge of system tuning. This is one of the many advantages of Enterprise Linux systems.

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The blog articles are written by people from the EuroLinux team. We owe 80% of the content to our developers, the rest is prepared by the sales or marketing department. We make every effort to ensure that the content is the best in terms of content and language, but we are not infallible. If you see anything that needs to be corrected or clarified, we'd love to hear from you.