Swap - VMware effects and parallelization

VMare and swap

To present our software marketing and scientific represents use Windows laptopts with Linux in VMWare. They need Linux because our web based product (Relibase+, IsoStar and incoming WebCSD) working only on it. Using virtualization shouldn't be a problem as a machine has 2GB of memory and we can assign 1GB to guest OS. However, recently we couldn't start WebCSD, not only guest was affected but also host froze. VMWare has problem with I/O operation so we were suspicious about disk usage, but the server didn't need to much of it. Anyway I went I/O trace and decided to turn off the swap. After that server started to work as a rocket!

Parallelization of a swap partitions

I was browins through IBM developersWorks and found info that you can parallelize a swap partition.

Amazingly, all modern Linux kernels, by default (with no special kernel options or patches) allow you to parallelize swap, just like a RAID 0 stripe. By using the pri option in /etc/fstab to set multiple swap partitions to the same priority, we tell Linux to use them in parallel:

/dev/sda2 none swap sw,pri=3 0 0
/dev/sdb2 none swap sw,pri=3 0 0
/dev/sdc2 none swap sw,pri=3 0 0
/dev/sdd2 none swap sw,pri=1 0 0

Creating service starting script

One of our customer ask what to do to start IsoStar server during system start. Our customer was using Centos (RedHat derivative) so I suggested to use the command line tool called chkconfig [1, 2]. TO use this tool you need a special script starting Isostar Apache server. The sample of such script can be found here [3]. Here is the example instruction. Let me assume that isostar is going to /opt directory.

1. Copy the script from link [3] to your HDD and call it isostar_server
2. Change line:

   /path/to/command/to/start/new-service

   to:

   /opt/csd/isostar/APACHE/bin/ccdc_apache start

   and line:

   /path/to/command/to/stop/new-service

   to:

   /opt/csd/isostar/APACHE/bin/ccdc_apache stop

3. Remove following lines (from both start and stop subsection):

         #Or to run it as some other user:
   /bin/su - username -c /path/to/command/to/start/new-service
   echo "."

4. Change 'new-service' in 'echo -n' lines to 'isostar_server'.
5. Now as a root copy isostar_server file into /etc/init.d/
6. Again as a root invoke chkconfig and add isostar_server: /sbin/chkconfig --add isostar_server

There are very similar tool for Debian (Ubuntu etc.) called update-rc.d [4, 5]. You should be able to use following command with the same (very similar script): update-rc.d isostar_server start 90 2 3 4 5 . stop 10 0 1 6.

Links

[1] http://linux.die.net/man/8/chkconfig
[2] http://spiralbound.net/2006/11/15/controlling-services-with-chkconfig
[3] http://spiralbound.net/2007/07/23/example-linux-init-script
[4] http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Update-rc.d
[5] http://www.annodex.net/cgi-bin/man/man2html?update-rc.d+8