Solaris™ Performance and Tools: DTrace and MDB Techniques for Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris

Appendix A. Tunables and Settings

As with most complex systems, parameters for overall control of the system can have a dramatic effect on performance. In the past much of a UNIX System Administrator’s time would be spent “tuning” the kernel parameters of a system to achieve greater performance, tighten security, or control a system more closely such as by limiting logins or processes per user. These days, the modern Solaris operating environment is reasonably well tuned out of the box and much of the kernel “tweaking” is generally not needed. That being said, some system parameters still need to be set for specific tasks and for changing the Solaris environment from that of generalized computing to one specialized for the customer’s environment. ...