You are right to say that, "There are many applications that require the system to be 'tuned' in order to run correctly."
In those cases, I prefer to call that configuration setup instead of 'tuning' the server because it cannot function properly without such settings:
Some examples that fall under this category are semaphore settings for Oracle, File descriptor handler for Application Server.
And there are others recommended settings like:
scsi queue for EMC storage, maxphys for solaris max io size, vxio:vol_maxio for VxVM max io size. I reckon these are the "golden" settings you are talking about here.
As for me, I would prefer to benchmark all these 'golden' settings during the UAT after implementation. If these are left out accidentally, it guess it is not going to break the application. Based on my experience from my implementation and benchmark, it will only improve the performance by <=10%. Not much to rave about.
Your statement, "In a single purpose server there can be a "golden" setting or settings, and the system should be tuned appropriately." is right to certain extent, but I will prefer to put it as, "In a single purpose server there can be a "golden" setting or settings, and the system can be tuned to meet the user expectation/requirement."
http://searchoracle.techtarget.com/q...075628,00.html