An Oracle Solaris project is a collection of processes with predefined attributes. The Multi-CPU binding (MCB) attribute is applied to processes that belong to the project. MCB is managed through Oracle Solaris projects.
To optimize workload response, you must first be able to identify the workloads that are running on the system you are analyzing. This information can be difficult to obtain by using either a purely process-oriented or a user-oriented method alone. In the Oracle Solaris system, you have two additional facilities that can be used to separate and identify workloads: the project and the task. The project provides a network-wide administrative identifier for related work. The task collects a group of processes into a manageable entity that represents a workload component.
The controls specified in the project name service database are set on the process, task, and project. Since process and task controls are inherited across fork and settaskid system calls, all processes and tasks that are created within the project inherit these controls. For information on these system calls, see the fork(2) and settaskid(2) man pages.
Based on their project or task membership, running processes can be manipulated with standard Oracle Solaris commands. The extended accounting facility can report on both process usage and task usage, and tag each record with the governing project identifier. This process enables offline workload analysis to be correlated with online monitoring. The project identifier can be shared across multiple systems through the project name service database. Thus, the resource consumption of related workloads that run on (or span) multiple systems can ultimately be analyzed across all of the systems.