Chapter 4. Configuring your environment for performance

The more physical CPU cores that are available to Satellite 6.3, the greater the throughput of tasks. It is important to balance throughput and task latency in a way that meets your needs. More CPU cores improve the scale of Red Hat Satellite 6’s deployment and should be the first consideration when you choose CPU hardware.

Provide adequate memory for your Red Hat Satellite installation. When determining how much memory you need, remember that you must provide memory for the following processes: Apache, Foreman, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Pulp, Puppet, Tomcat, Qpid, and the file system cache. A performant system does not swap even when Apache, Foreman, Puppet, or any other software is scaled to maximum on a single server.

Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) and disk capacity should be taken into account when determining what kind of disk to use. The file system can be partitioned over separate disks if necessary to increase capacity and IOPS on the directories that are most often accessed. The critical directories for IOPS and monitoring are /var/lib/pulp, /var/lib/pgsql, and /var/lib/mongodb.

During testing, network hardware was found consistently not to be a bottleneck before CPU or configuration limits were reached. This result was achieved on a 10Gb network that connected (1) Red Hat Satellite capsule servers and (2) an emulated content delivery network (CDN). The internet connection to the CDN is likely to be a bottleneck, but connections to the internet are beyond the scope of this document.

Your server is likely set by default to conserve power. This often diminishes performance. Configure your server’s BIOS to allow OS Host Power Control, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux will be able to control your server’s power consumption to improve the performance of Red Hat Satellite. Remember that power consumption comes at the expense of performance, and vice versa. Tune your Red Hat Satellite environment to provide the balance that is best for your situation.