Tuning AIX

Tuning any computer system requires time, patience, good data gathering techniques, and a good knowledge of what the server is being used for. DoIT routinely tunes machines running AIX for databases, web servers, and application servers (among other things), and can assist UW customers in finding and removing performance bottlenecks on their servers.

There are numerous tuning documents available on the Internet, each mentioning a little bit about tuning AIX. We've decided to put together some guides based on our knowledge so that others attempting to replicate what we achieve can do so rapidly.

You should have a few tools installed on your server before beginning. Monitor, from Mesa Consulting, is a program that will display many different statistics about your system. The AIX package bos.acct provides utilities like iostat and vmstat, and bos.adt.samples provides sample utilities to tune the AIX kernel (/usr/samples/kernel).