Tuning the filesystem

As we focus on tuning the different components that can impact I/O performance, we’ll try to steer our conversation away from the hardware side of things. Given the advancements in hardware, upgrading the memory, compute, network, and storage apparatus is bound to add at least some level of performance gains. However, most of the time, the magnitude of those gains will be limited. You need a well-designed and configured software stack to take advantage of that hardware. As we’re not focusing on a particular type of application, we’ll try to present some general tweaks that can be used to fine-tune your I/O. Again, note that the parameters that will be presented here or were discussed earlier require thorough testing and may not offer the same results in different environments.

Coming back to the topic of our discussion, filesystems are responsible for organizing data on disk and are the point of contact for an application to perform I/O...