What's New in Managing System Performance?

This section describes new or changed features in managing system performance in the Solaris release.

Enhanced pfiles Tool

Solaris 10: The /proc file system has been enhanced to include file name information in the /proc/pic/path directory. This information is used by pfiles to display file names for each file in the process. This change provides new insight into process behavior. For more information, see How to Display Information About Processes and the proc(1) man page.

CPU Performance Counters

Solaris 10: The CPU Performance Counter (CPC) system has been updated to give better access to the performance analysis features available in the SPARC and x86 platforms that run the Solaris Operating System.

The CPC commands cpustat and cputrack have enhanced, command-line syntax for specifying CPU information. For example, in previous versions of the Solaris OS, you were required to specify two counters. The configuration of both commands now allows you to specify only one counter, as shown in the following example:

# cputrack -c pic0=Cycle_cnt ls -d .
time lwp      event      pic0      pic1
.
0.034   1       exit    841167 

For simple measurements, you can even omit the counter configuration, as shown in the following example:

# cputrack -c Cycle_cnt ls -d .
   time lwp      event      pic0      pic1
  .
  0.016   1       exit    850736 

For more information on using the cpustat command, see the cpustat(1M) man page. For more information on using the cputrack command, see the cputrack(1) man page.