Solaris-specific setup for ADS mirror hosts

• Solaris kernel parameters: In order for us to use enough RAM to load our indexes, a few things need to be changed from the standard solaris kernel parameters. The following should be added at the end of the file /etc/system:

  * Set some shared memory options for the ADS databases:
  *   1. increase the max size of a shared memory segment to 64MB (from 1MB)
  *   2. increase the number of shared memory identifiers to 512
  *      (need about 35 for each database)
  *   3. increase the number of max attached shm segments per process to 128
  *   4. set the shared memory minimum segment size to 1MB
  * Make sure to reboot the system after you make these changes since 
  * the ADS services will break if the value specified here is 
  * inconsistent with what's in the running kernel
  set shmsys:shminfo_shmmax = 67108864
  set shmsys:shminfo_shmmni = 512
  set shmsys:shminfo_shmseg = 128
  set shmsys:shminfo_shmmin = 1
  

  The settings given above are known to be necessary for solaris versions 2.5-2.8. If you have a different version of the operating system and want to check the current settings, you can do so using the following command:

  root@solaris:  sysdef | grep -i shm
   67108864      max shared memory segment size (SHMMAX)
      1  min shared memory segment size (SHMMIN)
    512  shared memory identifiers (SHMMNI)
    128  max attached shm segments per process (SHMSEG)
  

• Solaris TCP/IP parameters: We reccommed that you tune your system's TCP/IP parameters for maximum WWW performance (especially if you have a busy web site). On our system we have the boot script /etc/init.d/wwwserver that we use to set all of the TCP/IP related parameters. It is known to work on systems running solaris 2.5 and 2.6.

  Other reccommended reading on the topic:

  • Solaris 2.x - tuning your TCP/IP stack and more.
  • Sun Performance Information

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