Managing System Resources (Overview)

This chapter provides a brief description of new Solaris 9 features and a map of features to help you manage system resources.

Using these features, you can display general system information, monitor disk space, set disk quotas, use accounting programs, and schedule the crontab and at commands to automatically run routine commands.

This section does not cover Solaris resource management that enables you to allocate, monitor, and control system resources in a flexible way.

For information on the procedures associated with managing system resources without Solaris resource management, see High-Level View of Managing System Resources (Task Map).

For information on managing system resources with Solaris resource management, see "Introduction to Solaris 9 Resource Manager" in System Administration Guide: Resource Management and Network Services.

What's New in Managing System Resources?

New df, du, and ls Options

The df, du, and ls commands have a new -h option to display disk usage and file or file system sizes in powers of 1024. This option makes it easier to interpret the output of the df, du, and ls -l commands by providing disk space in kilobytes, Mbytes, Gbytes, or terabytes if the file or directory size is larger than 1024 bytes.

For more information, see df(1B), du(1), and ls(1).

For more information in this guide, see How to Display Information About Files and Disk Space.

Changing System Parameters

In previous versions of this book, there was a section on changing system parameters such as increasing the number of processes per user and shared memory segments. This section has been removed. For information on changing system tunable parameters, see Solaris Tunable Parameters Reference Manual.

In addition, information on setting up a network time server has been moved to "Time-Related Services" in System Administration Guide: Resource Management and Network Services.

Solaris Resource Management

Solaris resource management enables you to control how applications use available system resources.

You can also set up the extended accounting facility to monitor and record resource consumption on a task or process basis.

Extended accounting introduces a new, variable length general-purpose accounting file format that represents general groups of accounting data. It provides the ability to configure resource utilization recorded by the kernel in the various accounting files.

Solaris resource management features include:

• Tasks - New process collectives for tracking resource usage.

• Projects - New administrative databases for charging resource usage. Resource usage can be charged to a project based on tasks performed.

• acctadm - A new tool for configuring various attributes of the extended accounting feature. For example, the resources tracked by the system accounting can be configured on a system-wide basis.

The new default accounting configuration requires no administration. However, do not remove the /etc/project file, even if you do not use the extended accounting features. Users cannot log in to the system unless this file exists.

Use the following table to find more information about the extended accounting features in this release.

High-Level View of Managing System Resources (Task Map)