Solaris 8 (Intel Platform Edition) 7/01 Release Notes

Priority Paging Is Not Needed With the New Solaris 8 Caching Architecture

The Solaris 8 operating environment introduces a new file system caching architecture, which subsumes the Solaris 7 Priority Paging functionality. You should not set the system variable priority_paging in the Solaris 8 operating environment, and you should remove the variable from the /etc/system file when systems are upgraded to the Solaris 8 operating environment.

The new caching architecture removes most of the pressure on the virtual memory system that resulted from file system activity. As a result, the new caching architecture changes the dynamics of the memory paging statistics, which makes observing system memory characteristics simpler. However, several of the statistics report significantly different values. You should consider these differences when analyzing memory behavior or setting performance monitoring thresholds. The most notable differences are: