1. Who this Manual is For This manual contains sections on system tuning and application tuning: • The intended audience for the system tuning section is the same as for the Red Hat course RH401 Red Hat Enterprise Deployment and Systems Management ; that is, primarily upper-level or senior system administrators. In addition to reading this manual, you should also take the Red Hat course RH442 Red Hat Enterprise System Monitoring and Performance Tuning. • Chapter 1 Evidence-Based Performance Analysis and Tuning gives you a strategy for perfor- mance tuning. Once you have determined where the problem is, then you can determine how to fix it—whether this requires reconfigured software, new hardware, or modifications to the application. • Chapter 2 System Tuning Tools for Linux Servers introduces many of the performance tuning tools that are available and describes how to use them to improve the performance of your system components. • Chapter 3 Understanding the Virtual Memory Management System describes the virtual memory management system. • Chapter 4 Tuning Linux Servers describes how to tune various components in your server. • Chapter 5 Increasing Performance Through System Changes looks at hardware upgrades that you could consider. • Appendix A PerformanceAnalysisScript is a performance-analysis script that you may find use- ful.