Operating-System-Monitoring on Netdata

Monitoring Disks: Workload, Latency & Saturation

Thu, 04 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Netdata provides a comprehensive set of charts that can help you understand the workload, performance, utilization, saturation, latency, responsiveness, and maintenance activities of your disks. In this blog we will focus on monitoring disks as block devices, not as filesystems or mount points.

The Disks section in the Overview tab contains all the charts that are mentioned in this blog post.

Disk Workload and Performance

Netdata charts for monitoring the workload and the throughput of your disks:

Understanding Huge Pages

Thu, 04 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Memory-intensive applications can benefit from improved performance by using huge pages, as they can reduce TLB pressure and memory fragmentation, and lower the memory management overhead overall. Developers should consider using HugeTLBfs in their mmap() and shmget() calls to take advantage of huge pages.

Transparent Huge Pages (THP) is a Linux kernel feature that provides some of the benefits of huge pages without requiring any development effort. However, THP can cause latency in many applications. Although kernel developers are actively working to address these issues, many system administrators prefer to disable THP altogether.

Unlock the Secrets of Kernel Memory Usage

Thu, 04 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The mem.kernel chart in Netdata provides insight into the memory usage of various kernel subsystems and mechanisms. By understanding these dimensions and their technical details, you can monitor your system’s kernel memory usage and identify potential issues or inefficiencies. Monitoring these dimensions can help you ensure that your system is running efficiently and provide valuable insights into the performance of your kernel and memory subsystem.

Slab

The slab allocator is a memory management mechanism introduced by Jeff Bonwick in 1994 to manage memory allocation for kernel objects. The main purpose of the slab allocator is to reduce memory fragmentation and improve the speed of memory allocation/deallocation. The slab allocator groups objects of the same size into “slabs” and caches the objects to speed up future allocations.

Entropy In Cryptography: Key To Security & Randomness

Wed, 03 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Entropy is a measure of the randomness or unpredictability of data. In the context of cryptography, entropy is used to generate random numbers or keys that are essential for secure communication and encryption. Without a good source of entropy, cryptographic protocols can become vulnerable to attacks that exploit the predictability of the generated keys.

What is Entropy?

In most operating systems, entropy is generated by collecting random events from various sources, such as hardware interrupts, mouse movements, keyboard presses, and disk activity. These events are fed into a pool of entropy, which is then used to generate random numbers when needed.

Linux CPU Consumption, Load & Pressure Explained