rpk Modes

Usability is paramount to us. We know the delta from downloading and running something from the internet and running in production is large. redpanda relies on interrupt coalescing, interrupt distribution, noop IO scheduling, CPU frequency scaling (performance governor), NIC multi-queue setup, memory locking and real-time scheduling. Not to mention measuring the IO throughput to disk, etc and keeping them updated with every release.

While these settings exist to give the users predictable low latency, high throughput, high resource utilization, etc, they are not good settings for developer’s laptops. We keep a set of auto-tunables in big groups: rpk mode developer and rpk mode production.

These commands are idempotent, they’re safe to run multiple times. Some settings might require restart of redpanda, others are injected into the runtime settings of the kernel and can take effect immediately if followed by a rpk tune all. Users can also review and edit redpanda.yaml and enable or disable any individual setting manually, or to enable experimental flags.