[CentOS-devel] RFC: Performance tuning of the Vagrant images

Tue Apr 26 17:42:49 UTC 2016
Vince Skahan <vds at uw.edu>

I'd suggest keeping centos6 looking like vanilla centos6 to the extent possible, rather than adding things not native to that base os as it comes from upstream.....

Re: deltarpm, again I'd have centos7 run like vanilla unaltered centos7 to the extent possible.  If it uses deltarpm, so be it.

Once you go down the path of over-optimizing for one or a few user communities, you'll be signing up for a lot of labor and questions regarding 'why does my vagrant box not work like a baremetal centosNNN box?' type questions.   Danger.....

--
Vince Skahan
Infrastructure Engineering and Support
Office of Research Information Services (ORIS)

-----Original Message-----
From: centos-devel-bounces at centos.org [mailto:centos-devel-bounces at centos.org] On Behalf Of Laurentiu Pancescu
Sent: Tuesday, April 26, 2016 6:56 AM
To: The CentOS developers mailing list. <centos-devel at centos.org>
Subject: [CentOS-devel] RFC: Performance tuning of the Vagrant images

Hello everyone,

I would like to ask for your feedback about tuning the official CentOS images for Vagrant.  The good news: the next release will probably provide Vagrant images for both CentOS 6 and 7, not just 7 as until now.

Deltarpm allows yum to download just binary diffs for the already installed packages and rebuild the rpms locally, thus decreasing the used bandwidth.  However, this is quite CPU and I/O intensive, and significantly slower than just downloading the full packages (at least for users on any sort of broadband connection).  Deltarpm can be useful for users in development countries, which do not always have access to unmetered broadband, while someone hosting many VM instances on the same server, like a VPS provider, might want to avoid the extra I/O load (especially on mechanical hard-disks).  Deltarpm is already part of the CentOS 7 images since May 2015 - should we keep it or remove it?

Tuned, a daemon that can adjust system parameters based on the workload (it comes with a number of profiles, optimized for different situations), is preinstalled in CentOS 7, and can significantly improve performance and/or reduce load.  Tuned can also be installed in CentOS 6, and it would increase the size of the Vagrant image with just 291kB, since its prerequisites are already installed.  Should we add it to CentOS 6?  If you are not familiar with tuned, the following links might be helpful:

http://servicesblog.redhat.com/2012/04/16/tuning-your-system-with-tuned/
http://www.slideshare.net/IamFedora/tuned


Thanks in advance,
Laurențiu
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