To Autotune or Not to Autotune; That is the Question

[yottabit]

Philosophy aside, my server is 32-thread (2x8x2 Xeon) with 64 GB of ECC RAM. It's an oldie, but still a reliable workhorse. (Pepperidge Farm remembers what that used to be a lot of RAM.)

On FreeNAS and CORE I used the autotune parameter for years and never had any problems. I thought it was supposed to update some kernel parameters to take advantage of that large amount of RAM, etc.

Now on SCALE I notice a couple things:

1. Autotune is disabled by default (why?)
2. Autotune has a tooltip saying it is only intended "as a temporary measure and is not a permanent fix for system hardware issues"

What is its purpose then? Should I enable it or not?

Thanks!

 

[SnoppyFloppy]

I'm not an expert but I'm quite sure that unless you explicitly experience kernel related issues, you should leave it off.

Oldie is a relative term, is the CPU in the e5-26xx range?

 

[yottabit]

Yes, Xeon E5-2670 (Sandybridge, v1)... I was able to pick up a couple on the cheap many years ago when one of the big IT companies upgraded a data center and these flooded the market. Huge upgrade from what I was running before, though; and for my workloads still more than I need. But these are now over 9 years old.