Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Administration Unleashed

CHAPTER 22Monitoring and TuningApplicationsIN THIS CHAPTER. OProfile. Valgrind. Additional Programs toConsiderChapter 20, “Monitoring System Resources,” coveredmonitoring and tuning system resources, and Chapter 21,“Monitoring and Tuning the Kernel,” discussed monitoringand tuning the kernel, but Part V, “Monitoring andTuning,” would not be complete without discussing applicationtuning. Because this is a book for administrators,this chapter explains in detail two programs for tuningapplications, OProfile and Valgrind, which can also bebeneficial for administrators. It also provides briefoverviews of additional application tuning programs forthose interested.OProfileOProfile accesses the performance monitoring hardware onthe system’s processor if available to gather performancerelateddata, which can then be used to identify areas forimprovement.To use OProfile, the oprofile RPM package must beinstalled. It can be installed via RHN as described inChapter 3, “Operating System Updates.” The kerneldebuginfopackage must also be installed to adequatelycollect data from the kernel. It is available via FTP from theftp.redhat.com FTP server. After logging in as an anonymoususer, change into the /pub/redhat/linux/enterprise//en/os//Debuginfo/ directory, replacing and with the appropriate values for yoursystem. You can also view the list of packages by visitinghttp://ftp.redhat.com/ in a web browser, but it is recommendedthat you download any files using an FTP clientinstead.