What's New in the Solaris 9 9/04 Operating Environment

System Performance Enhancements

The Solaris 9 release includes the following system performance enhancements.

SPARC: 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 on UltraSPARC platforms 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 the applications 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 pagesize(1), mpss.so.1(1), ppgsz(1), and mmap(2).

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 Network Cache and Accelerator (NCA)

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

SPARC: Performance Improvement for Servers

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

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. This feature eliminates the misconfiguration problem and denial-of-service security vulnerability of Intimate Shared Memory (ISM).

The ISM is a shared memory segment that consists of large locked memory pages. The ISM number of locked pages remains constant or unchanged. Dynamic ISM (DISM) is pageable ISM shared memory, where the number of locked pages is variable or changeable. 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).


Note –

Large-page support is available for DISM in the Solaris 9 9/02 Update release. For a description of this large-page support, see SPARC: Dynamic Intimate Shared Memory (DISM) Large-Page Support.