While the default configuration of Linux and Ceph will likely provide reasonable performance due to many years of research and tweaking by developers, it is likely that a Ceph administrator may want to try to squeeze more performance out of the hardware. By tuning both the operating system and Ceph, performance gains may be realized. In Chapter 1, Planning for Ceph, you learned about how to choose hardware for a Ceph cluster; now, let's learn how to make the most of it.

In this chapter, you will learn about the following topics:

• Latency and why it matters
• The importance of being able to observe the results of your tuning
• Key tuning options that you should look at