I recently upgraded one of our development V440s from Solaris 9 to Solaris 10 (update 9). The system has 4 X 1.6GHz CPUs, 8GB of RAM, an 8GB swap partition on the internal boot disk and a 20GB swap file on a SAN disk. One of the developers reported that a test that starts 1001 processes slows the system to a crawl and never finishes. This test reportedly ran successfully in a few minutes in Solaris 9. Unfortunately I just configured sar on this system so I have no performance history to compare from Solaris 9. I ran top, vmstat and prstat while the test ran and all seemed to indicate the system ran out of physical memory. I have included samples of the prstat, top and vmstat output from during the test. Is there a kernel setting that can be set to allow the system to perform as it reportedly did in during Solaris 9?

**prstat -Z output**

  PID USERNAME  SIZE   RSS STATE  PRI NICE      TIME  CPU PROCESS/NLWP
  5895 deadm      23M   12M sleep   10    0   0:00:33 7.0% mcadbs/1
  5846 root     3264K 1288K cpu3    59    0   0:00:04 1.1% prstat/1
  5898 deadm      35M   19M sleep   60    0   0:00:02 0.4% fame/1
  6769 deadm      29M   17M sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.2% mcadbs/1
  6766 deadm      29M   17M sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.2% mcadbs/1
  6772 deadm      29M   17M sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.2% mcadbs/1
  6755 deadm      29M   17M sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.2% mcadbs/1
  6770 deadm      29M   17M sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.2% mcadbs/1
  6767 deadm      29M   17M sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.2% mcadbs/1
  6753 deadm      29M   13M sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.2% mcadbs/1
  6765 deadm      29M   17M sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.2% mcadbs/1
  6750 deadm      29M   17M sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.2% mcadbs/1
  6754 deadm      29M   17M sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.2% mcadbs/1
  6756 deadm      29M   17M sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.2% mcadbs/1
  6762 deadm      29M   13M sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.2% mcadbs/1
  6752 deadm      29M   17M sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.2% mcadbs/1
  6758 deadm      29M   17M sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.2% mcadbs/1
   233 root      197M   16M sleep   59    0   1:23:27 0.2% nscd/286
  6757 deadm      29M   17M sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.2% mcadbs/1
  6760 deadm      29M   17M sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.2% mcadbs/1
  6764 deadm      29M   17M sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.2% mcadbs/1
  6768 deadm      29M   17M sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.2% mcadbs/1
  6731 deadm      29M   13M sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.2% mcadbs/1
  6740 deadm      29M   13M sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.2% mcadbs/1
  6771 deadm      29M   17M sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.2% mcadbs/1
  6751 deadm      29M   17M sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.2% mcadbs/1
  6736 deadm      29M   17M sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.2% mcadbs/1
  6749 deadm      29M   17M sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.2% mcadbs/1
  6759 deadm      29M   17M sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.2% mcadbs/1
  6738 deadm      29M   17M sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.2% mcadbs/1
  6729 deadm      29M 8752K sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.2% mcadbs/1
  6733 deadm      29M   17M sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.2% mcadbs/1
  6739 deadm      29M   13M sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.2% mcadbs/1
  6746 deadm      29M   17M sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.2% mcadbs/1
  5791 richard. 2808K  688K sleep   59    0   0:00:05 0.1% top/1
  6726 deadm      29M 8880K sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.1% mcadbs/1
  6727 deadm      29M   13M sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.1% mcadbs/1
  6743 deadm      29M   13M sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.1% mcadbs/1
  6748 deadm      29M   17M sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.1% mcadbs/1
  6761 deadm      29M   17M sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.1% mcadbs/1
  6730 deadm      29M   13M sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.1% mcadbs/1
   733 root       29M 3864K sleep   59    0   0:00:00 0.2% mcadbs/1
ZONEID    NPROC  SWAP   RSS MEMORY      TIME  CPU ZONE
     0      838   16G 7641M    93%  50:07:14  34% global
Total: 838 processes, 1304 lwps, load averages: 3.11, 1.09, 0.43


**top output**

load averages:  3.10,  1.18,  0.47                         soldev1                        14:30:29
1082 processes:1071 sleeping, 6 running, 1 stopped, 4 on cpu
CPU states: 44.4% idle, 34.5% user, 21.1% kernel,  0.0% iowait,  0.0% swap
Memory: 8.0G real, 156M free, 20.2G swap in use, 44.6G swap free

   PID USERNAME THR PR NCE  SIZE   RES STATE   TIME FLTS    CPU COMMAND
  5895 deadm      1 53   0 23.1M 11.8M sleep   0:35    0  5.51% mcadbs
  5846 root       1 60   0 3488K 1608K cpu01   0:04   45  0.81% prstat
  5898 deadm      1 59   0 39.0M 23.4M sleep   0:02   32  0.33% fame
  6839 deadm      1 59   0 29.2M 16.7M sleep   0:00    0  0.25% mcadbs
  6848 deadm      1 59   0 29.2M 16.7M sleep   0:00    0  0.25% mcadbs
  6842 deadm      1 59   0 29.2M 16.6M sleep   0:00    0  0.24% mcadbs
  6844 deadm      1 59   0 29.2M 16.7M sleep   0:00    0  0.24% mcadbs
  6849 deadm      1 59   0 29.2M 16.7M sleep   0:00    0  0.24% mcadbs
  6846 deadm      1 59   0 29.2M 16.7M sleep   0:00    0  0.23% mcadbs
  6840 deadm      1 59   0 29.2M 16.7M sleep   0:00    0  0.23% mcadbs
  6852 deadm      1 59   0 29.2M 16.6M sleep   0:00    0  0.23% mcadbs
  6841 deadm      1 59   0 29.2M 16.6M sleep   0:00    0  0.22% mcadbs
  6853 deadm      1 59   0 29.2M 16.7M sleep   0:00    0  0.22% mcadbs
   233 root     286 59   0  197M 17.3M sleep  83:27  173  0.21% nscd
  6847 deadm      1 59   0 29.2M 16.7M sleep   0:00    0  0.20% mcadbs

**vmstat output**

root@soldev1:/]# vmstat 5
 kthr      memory             page                                 disk               faults             cpu
 r b w   swap    free    re   mf    pi    po     fr    de sr    s0  s1   s2   s3   in    sy     cs    us  sy  id
 0 5 33 18905016 6647272 85   228   328   161    162   0  51    0   13   5    0    442   3774   354   3   1   96
 0 0 74 56034928 7245784 30   113   49    0      0     0  0     0   2    2    0    390   1054   287   4   0   95
 0 0 74 56035808 7246520 6    52    54    0      0     0  0     0   9    3    0    397   21887  291   3   2   94
 0 0 74 56035808 7246488 0    8     41    0      0     0  0     0   26   1    0    455   21831  329   3   3   94
 0 0 74 56028816 7234224 846  414   6702  0      0     0  0     0   117  2    0    737   22840  1105  10  3   87
 0 0 74 56002032 7204936 345  1499  2387  2      2     0  0     0   184  4    25   618   21238  745   5   4   91
 0 1 74 55800696 7062536 331  2533  1184  5      5     0  0     0   51   119  0    878   15787  2460  4   12  84
 0 4 74 53907784 5763064 0    3124  1745  0      0     0  0     0   126  297  0    1038  21632  4554  4   28  69
 0 1 74 51602344 4180568 113  4157  1451  0      0     0  0     0   71   272  0    1463  28515  4805  11  36  53
 3 0 74 49457456 2707352 217  3736  602   0      0     0  0     0   24   166  0    3325  22810  4630  61  33  6
 7 1 74 48195408 1837136 158  2833  597   0      0     0  0     0   97   123  7    3844  18825  4811  69  27  3
 4 1 74 46946048 976048  203  3922  804   0      0     0  0     0   37   157  0    3168  23962  4156  56  40  4
 6 1 74 45780264 195344  117  2681  881   195    158   0  23750 0   42   99   0    3049  14804  4070  55  31  14
 3 2 74 45225640 119184  68   1375  560   83933  85554 0  25008 0   261  299  0    2316  10306  2403  26  29  45
 0 3 74 44799112 112456  67   1173  707   54368  59309 0  25375 0   199  199  0    1805  10475  2371  18  25  57
 0 4 74 44297920 96832   60   917   220   62251  67962 0  35145 0   207  206  0    1493  6808   1760  12  23  65
 1 5 74 43906520 136472  75   1197  442   61409  61355 0  17943 0   185  244  1    1652  8005   1884  14  23  63
 1 3 74 43335592 113008  87   1495  227   83296  83211 0  25368 0   252  292  0    2191  10156  2278  25  31  45