Posted in Scaling by François Schiettecatte on May 17, 2008

This article has some interesting suggestions on tuning TCP on linux for machines which have to support a lot of network IO.

Also mentioned are some other suggestions for tuning the linux machines in general, setting such things as vm.swappiness and ‘noatime’ on file systems.

Talking about ‘noatime’, I did a lot of testing on that and found that it really reduced disk I/O on drives where lots of files are accessed frequently such as cache files. My policy on this is to set ‘noatime’ on all partitions unless you need to know when files were last accessed.