[GRLUG] swap benchmarking

[Tim Schmidt]

On 2/19/07, Bob Kline <bob.kline at gmail.com> wrote:
>  Clearly an SA is going to have to
>  get pretty handy at knowing just
>  which of these factors applies so
>  a company doesn't blow money in
>  on useless remedies.

Correct.

>  Is there a decent canned package
>  that a home user can use to look
>  for bottlenecks?   Something that
>  will monitor the system for a while
>  and suggest areas that need
>  improvement?  Something preferably
>  free?

Not that I know of.  There are plenty of packages that do a good job
with each part of what you're asking for, not any that does the whole
deal (again, as far as I know).  For that matter, it can be hard to
gather correct statistics in the first place, a recent thread on LKML
resulted in several different test applications that could consume as
much as 90% of the available CPU time while appearing to userspace
(including top, /proc, etc.) as using 0%.  The kernel only grabs CPU
usage information on each timer interrupt.

--tim