Many of our customers are running FreeBSD enterprise deployments. ZXTM fully supports operation on a BSD based Operating System. Being a UNIX, there are a number of kernel tunings we can perform to increase the performance and efficiency of ZXTM when deployed on the stable environment BSD offers.

BSD Kernel Tuneables

These tunables have been deployed and tested under a FreeBSD 5 environment, at present Zeus does not support FreeBSD 6, however customers have still reported positive performance under FreeBSD 6 and ZXTM. Tunings suggested here have been rigorously stress-tested on a server with 2GB memory.

Please note: ZXTM will natively support FreeBSD 6 with version 4.1

$ZEUSHOME/zxtm/global.cfg

use_mx kevent

By default, ZXTM uses the system call poll() to multiplex between network sockets. On BSD, we have found the use of kevent() to significantly enhance ZXTMs efficiency when handling load. Note that we have seen problems with this mechanism on older versions of FreeBSD (5.2 and earlier) - if you are running on one of these legacy versions, we advise you to upgrade.

/boot/loader.conf

kern.ipc.nmbclusters=16384

/etc/sysctl.conf

kern.ipc.somaxconn=4096

This tuning increases the listen queue size for the OS (from a default value of 128), which enables BSD to accept a greater number of new connections.

net.inet.ip.portrange.first: 1024
net.inet.ip.portrange.last: 48000
net.inet.ip.portrange.hifirst: 49152
net.inet.ip.portrange.hilast: 65535

The wide range allows ZXTM to make a greater number of outgoing connections, which is vital if keepalives aren't being used.

kern.maxfiles=2097152
kern.maxfilesperproc=8192

The enables ZXTM to take advantage of a greater number of file descriptors. Consequently, ZXTM can increase the number of concurrent users and/or connections it can handle.

Chris Buckley [Zeus Support] 11 July 2006   3 comments