[...] > Maybe preload (if there's anything like that) have > build a library with a list of applications to load? > It behaves like this in Linux... [...]
I don't know if anyone has ported the Linux preload daemon to Solaris. I wrote my own preloader, but it's much dumber - it simply takes a list of files to mmap() and optionally lock into memory, it does _not_ look on its own for binaries or libraries that are good candidates. (If not requested to lock files into memory, my preloader will (unless compiled not to) instead access the first byte of each page, in an attempt to at least get them loaded into memory; whether or not they stay there is up to the system.) Just for the heck of testing disk accesses fairly, I also wrote something that mmaps a file and then uses madvise() with MADV_DONTNEED on it to evict that file from the VM cache (so that it will be read from disk next time); on versions of Solaris where memtool still worked (has it been updated lately?), that did indeed seem to function as I intended. No idea whether MADV_DONTNEED also evicts it from the ZFS ARC, at least not without digging probably very deep into code I might not understand anyway. Google for NO_PAGE_IN NO_LOCKING to find the former, and MADV_DONTNEED S_ISREG freemap to find the latter. (I posted them to Usenet ages ago, but AFAIK don't have them on a web or ftp server.) PS. I just took a _very_ quick look at the source for the Linux preload daemon. It appears to monitor /proc to find interesting files to cache (executables or libraries). That could probably be done on Solaris too, (esp. Solaris 10 or later, with /proc/*/path/*), but it would take a fair number of changes due at the very least to differences in /proc. And I suppose it might well need to be "tuned" a bit differently to be at least as effective on Solaris as it is said to be (by some, anyway) on Linux. I think a rewrite might be better, esp. _if_ non-polling file event notification (OpenSolaris) could be used to detect changes in /proc (processes creation and termination); I hate having anything polling if it can be avoided. (No, I'm not volunteering, and I have no immediate plans to play with the notion...but if somebody knows enough to advise on effective strategy differences, actually coding this probably wouldn't be rocket science.) -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
