Installation guide

WebNFS Software
WebNFS software enables file systems to be accessible through the Web using the
NFS protocol. This protocol is very reliable and provides greater throughput under a
heavy load. Also, files can be made publicly accessible without the overhead
associated with an anonymous ftp site.
Additional information may be found in NFS Administration Guide.
Performance Improvements
Solaris 2.6 performance enhancements focused on improving database and web
performance while maintaining the already high levels of file server and time-share
performance seen in the Solaris 2.5.1 release.
Database Performance
Significant efforts were made to improve performance of the system for database
engines. Work focused on two areas: virtual memory (VM) improvements and I/O
throughput improvements.
VM changes focused on reducing overhead by using larger pages for the shared
memory area used by database engines to share and store data. Instead of using the
default system page size for pages in this area, a large page size of 4 Mbytes is used.
This reduces the amount of internal work the system has to do when managing the
descriptions attached to each process for pages the process is using. When coupled
with existing mechanisms for sharing these descriptions, a performance increase of
about 12% was achieved on various industry standard tests.
I/O throughput jumped as the result of low-level changes that minimized the
overhead associated with processing large lists of pages for I/O. These modifications
reduced the overhead associated with converting the virtual address used by the
system to the physical address needed by the device drivers to execute I/O requests.
With these improvements, the cost of doing I/O to physical devices dropped
dramatically.
Throughput improvements have been demonstrated in a recent Informix TPC-C
benchmark which
produced 15,461 tpmC at $134/tpmC
with 13,000 users
on an SMCC E4000 with 14 * 250 Mhz cpus and 5 Gbytes of memory.
This produced the highest Informix TPC-C number ever produced and reflects the
best price/performance in the mid-range class.
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Information Library for Solaris 2.6 (Intel Platform Edition) ♦ August 1997