Recommended Books

Performance and Tracing

Solaris 10 dynamic tracing
Solaris statistics API - kstat
Sun Sysadmin portal

Solaris Tuneables

Solaris 9 12/02 Tunable Parameters Reference
Solaris 8 2/02 Tunable Parameters Reference

SPARC Architecture

UltraSPARC I/II User's Manual
UltraSPARC III Cu User's Manual
An Overview of the UltraSPARC III Cu processor

File Systems

Oracle File System Performance, Richard McDougall, SUPerG Hawaii 2001 Getting to know the Solaris File System - Part 1, Richard McDougall, SunWorld Magazine 1999
Getting to know the Solaris File System - Part 2, Richard McDougall, SunWorld Magazine 1999
Getting to know the Solaris File System - Part 3, Richard McDougall, SunWorld Magazine 1999

Resource Management

An Introduction to Resource Management, Richard McDougall et al, SuperG Washington 1999

Virtual Memory

Multiple Page Size Overview Paper
Muliple Page Size Support, Richard McDougall, 2004
Memory Sizing Paper (old), Richard McDougall, 1996
Priority Paging, Richard McDougall et al, 1997
Memory Sizing Overview, Richard McDougall, CMG 1998

Threads

Alternate 1:1 thread Implementation in S8, default in S9
The Solaris 8 OE introduced an alternate implementation based on the 1:1 model which leveraged the improvements in kernel threading directly at the process level. The 1:1 implementation was simpler to develop, and its code paths were generally more efficient than those of the old implementation. In the Solaris 8 OE, the MxN implementation remains the default, whereas the 1:1 model is the default in Solaris 9. Users have tested the new 1:1 implementation, and many have adopted it.

Extensive testing and production use of the new implementation has delivered significant gains in application performance (an Oracle OLAP workload test showed up to a 400-percent performance improvement1, for example). Meanwhile, the implementation is proving to be more robust and intuitive than its predecessor. Applications are benefitting from increased availability, and developers must deal with fewer caveats and exceptions to expected behavior. Within Sun, the new implementation is high quality and easy to maintain.