New Package: Tuna on RHEL 7
What is it?
Many customer applications create exotic workloads that can not be represented with cookie-cutter, industry-standard benchmarks designed for particular data traffic in mind (e.g., OLTP, Rich Media, DSS).
This variance in application workload can introduce significant complexity for managing overall system performance. Systems configured and set up for a n dimensional optimization point with a particular benchmark in mind might not provide the optimum yield for the application at hand.
One expensive remedy would be to augment the configuration with more hardware, but before doing that, optimization tools are recommended to tune the system, increase efficiency, and exploit economies of scale.
Tuna is a performance-optimization tool (package) that consists of an application tuning GUI and command-line utility. It provides an interface for changing scheduler and IRQ tunables at whole-CPU and at per-thread/IRQ levels. It also allows you to isolate CPUs for use by a specific application and moving threads, and it allows interrupts to a CPU by just dragging and dropping them. Operations can be done on CPU sockets, understanding CPU topology.
What are its benefits?
Tuna will benefit customers who seek to get the best out of their systems through proactive load balancing and monitoring, all on the live production environment. It will help savy administrators avoid hot spots, prevent performance problems, and avoid potential service calls.
Tuna has a mature and proven track record operating in tandem with MRG-Realtime kernel. Including it in RHEL 7 will add to the value we provide to our downstream community. Tuna is already a part of the Fedora project and is well received upstream.
