Adrian Cockcroft and Jim Mauro take on questions about threads, and readers praise security wizard Carole Fennelly's series on sendmail

July  1999

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Performance Q&A with Adrian Cockcroft

http://www.sunworld.com/sunworldonline/common/swol-backissues-columns.html#perf

Needed: Cache profiling tool

Adrian,

I have been following your SunWorld columns with interest.

We are heavy Solaris users and need a cache profiling tool that will reveal the cache behavior of our processes. We are running mostly Ultra 2 boxes with Solaris 2.5 and Solaris 7.

Is there any available tool that supports the above OS/arch?

Thanks for your time,
Sandeep Joshi

Sandeep,

To profile CPU cache usage in detail (line by line) you need to use a simulator like SimICS (http://www.virtutech.se/); if you want to look at the cache hit rates for each process, we are working on tools to be included in Solaris 8. In the meantime, there are some unsupported tools, so ask your local Sun SE to lookup hstat. Local policy varies on what internal tools can be provided and whether a nondisclosure agreement must be signed first.

Adrian

Measuring threads' CPU usage

Adrian,

I am writing a multithreaded C application using pthreads. The target architecture is Solaris 7. Can you advise me on how I can measure the CPU usage of threads?

Thanks,
Sam Murray-Smith

Sam,

Check out ps -L and proc(4):

% ps -Lp 540
   PID   LWP TTY     LTIME CMD
   540    20 ?        0:03 dtmail
   540     2 ?        0:00 dtmail
   540     3 ?        0:00 dtmail
   540    22 ?        0:03 dtmail
   540     5 ?        0:00 dtmail
   540    30 ?        0:00 dtmail
   540     8 ?        0:00 dtmail
   540    28 ?        0:03 dtmail
   540    29 ?        0:00 dtmail

Adrian,

We read your book (Sun Performance and Tuning: Java and the Internet, Second Edition,) but we didn't find anything about filesystem priority access. The question is: Is there any way to set filesystem access priority on Solaris? For example, suppose that we have two filesystems, A and B. When concurrent requests for blocks are made, we want those in A to be processed first.

Thanks,
Rogerio Pelloso Gelamo

Rogerio,

There is no way to do this. Priority for CPU time and network packets can be established using the Solaris Resource Manager and Bandwidth Manager products, but there is no disk or filesystem priority scheme in any of the Unix systems as far as I know.

Adrian

Inside Solaris: Priorities revisited by Jim Mauro

http://www.sunworld.com/swol-06-1999/swol-06-insidesolaris.html

What's with the third thread?

Jim,

This month's Inside Solaris is too informative. Congratulations! In your series of articles about multithreading you mentioned the creation of three threads for a non-multithreaded process when compiled with -lthread. I would like to get more details about the reason for creating the third thread (1-main thread,2-aslwp). I would be very much grateful for your assistance.

Ravindra Babu

Ravindra,

The third thread is a scheduler or dispatcher thread. User-level threads are scheduled separately from kernel threads. Kernel threads are scheduled based on scheduling class and priority by the kernel dispatcher, and a kernel thread is placed on a processor for execution.

User threads are scheduled by a thread in the thread's library (scheduled based on priority), and are linked to an LWP (lightweight process) when scheduled for execution.

Jim

Wizard's Guide to Security 'Setting up sendmail on a firewall, Parts 1 to 3' by Carole Fennelly

http://www.sunworld.com/swol-04-1999/swol-04-security.html

http://www.sunworld.com/swol-05-1999/swol-05-security.html

http://www.sunworld.com/swol-06-1999/swol-06-security.html

Thanks for the series

Carole,

I've been maintaining sendmail on firewalls and mail hubs for five or six years and find your sendmail columns nicely done! They are informative but not verbose. I really appreciate the way you laid out the new features in 8.9.3. I hope to see more sendmail columns from you in the future.

Doug Nomura

More kudos for Carole

Hi Carole,

I just wanted to send an e-mail of thanks for yet another excellent article. I found the "Audits from Hell" article to be extremely interesting (and humorous), and this most recent article to be really useful. One of my coworkers has just been given the responsibility of maintaining sendmail for NCSU, so he'll be very grateful too I'm sure.

Your work is very much appreciated!

Regards,
Ken Williams

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