Monitoring and Tuning Your Server

Monitoring is an essential part of server administration. By monitoring the server’s performance, you can spot problematic trends as they develop, and take steps to prevent them from turning into emergencies. Monitoring also helps you decide when to upgrade your hardware, and whether upgrades are actually improving your server’s performance appropriately. Also, while some server problems are obvious, some develop over time; and unless you have a baseline against which to judge and compare, you can be blind-sided by a problem that you might have avoided. This section is intended to help you use the System Monitor and other tools to develop both a baseline and a monitoring strategy to help you track the performance of your server.

Tuning your server improves the client experience, helps you avoid some bottlenecks, and sometimes extends the interval between hardware upgrades. You can use the information from your monitoring program to decide how you should best tune your server.

This section does not discuss client connections or client-side performance, except to the extent that the client’s performance is controlled by the server.

In this section: