Joerg Moellenkamp delves into the less known Solaris features to discuss Resource Management. His examination stems from two preliminary questions: How to limit the consumption of the resources of a single application being run with others in a single instance of the OS; and how to prevent a single program from hogging all the resources available.

In an effort to de-mystify his subject, Moellenkamp reassures his readers that they have, perhaps unbeknownst to themselves, already worked with the elements called tasks and projects in the very act of logging in to their systems. Using the example of creating a new system populated with users at a hypothetical university, he demonstrates, showing how to configure it and how to allow the system itself to configure tasks.

Rhetorically, Moellenkamp asks, why is all this stuff important for Resource Management, and he answers that projects and tasks can be used to assign limits to the multiple services stemming from multiple processes on a system, thereby reducing the complexity of configuring resource management to each separate process.

In the next section of his paper, the author shows how to impose resource management and thereby limit demands on operating system resources. His example demonstrates how to limit a task to nine processes and how to deny a fork on the tenth attempt, thus avoiding a system crash.

Moellenkamp then turns to a demonstration of how to use the Fair Share Scheduler, a feature of the Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS) to achieve management of CPU usage.

The Solaris OS can also control the amount of data residing in real memory, Moellenkamp continues. That process begins with the activation of the resource cap enforcement daemon. He shows how the daemon can page out infrequently used pages of memory to reduce the resource consumption of a process group.

Moellenkamp concludes with a discussion of the Service Management Facility (SMF) -- a framework to manage services in Solaris -- that enables Solaris to start services in a more intelligent manner, noting that users can specify the projects to be used for a service, rather than allowing SMF to start all the services, most of which are members of the project system. [...read more...]

From the latest issue:

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