System Performance Enhancements

Multiple Page Size Support

Multiple Page Size Support (MPSS) allows a program to use any hardware-supported page sizes to access portions of virtual memory. Previously only 8-KB pages were available for a program's stack, heap, or anonymous memory mapped with mmap().

You can use MPSS to run legacy applications with specific memory page size settings where they benefit from this sort of performance tuning. The use of larger page sizes might significantly improve the performance of programs that intensively use large amounts of memory.  

For more information, see the man pages for pagesize(1), mpss.so.1(1), and ppgsz(1).

Solaris 9 

Improved Multithreading Library

This release includes an improved and faster multithreading library, which was available as the alternate libthread in previous Solaris software releases.

For further information, see the Multithreaded Programming Guide and the threads(3THR) man page.

Solaris 9 

Solaris Network Cache and Accelerator (NCA)

The Solaris Network Cache and Accelerator (NCA) has been improved with the addition of a sockets interface to NCA through which any web server can communicate with NCA with minimal modifications. See "Networking".

Solaris 8 7/01 

Performance Improvement for Servers

Enhancements have been made to the algorithm that controls virtual/physical pages and how they are cached. These enhancements deliver increased system performance of around 10% for general user loads in servers. 

Solaris 8 1/01 

Dynamic Intimate Shared Memory (DISM)

Dynamic Intimate Shared Memory (DISM) allows a database to dynamically extend or reduce the size of the shared data segment, eliminating the misconfiguration problem and denial-of-service security vulnerability present with Intimate Shared Memory (ISM). 

The ISM is a shared memory segment consisting of large locked memory pages. The ISM number of locked pages remains constant (cannot be changed). Dynamic ISM (DISM) is pageable ISM shared memory, where the number of locked pages is variable (can be changed). Therefore, the DISM supports releasing or adding more physical memory to the system during dynamic reconfiguration. The size of the DISM can span available physical memory plus disk swap. 

See the man page shmop(2).

Solaris 8 1/01