Determining Appropriate Remedial Action

When the resource controller determines that a resource consumer is short of resources, the initial response is that increasing the resources will improve performance.

Alternative configurations that meet the objectives specified in the configuration for the scope of control are examined and evaluated.

This process is refined over time as the results of shifting resources are monitored and each resource partition is evaluated for responsiveness. The decision history is consulted to eliminate reconfigurations that did not show improvements in attaining the objective function in the past. Other information, such as process names and quantities, are used to further evaluate the relevance of the historical data.

If the daemon cannot take corrective action, the condition is logged. For more information, see poold Logging Information.

Using poolstat to Monitor the Pools Facility and Resource Utilization

The poolstat utility is used to monitor resource utilization when pools are enabled on your system. This utility iteratively examines all of the active pools on a system and reports statistics based on the selected output mode. The poolstat statistics enable you to determine which resource partitions are heavily utilized. You can analyze these statistics to make decisions about resource reallocation when the system is under pressure for resources.

The poolstat utility includes options that can be used to examine specific pools and report resource set-specific statistics.

If zones are implemented on your system and you use poolstat in a non-global zone, information about the resources associated with the zone's pool is displayed.

For more information about the poolstat utility, see the poolstat(1M) man page. For poolstat task and usage information, see Using poolstat to Report Statistics for Pool-Related Resources.

poolstat Output

In default output format, poolstat outputs a heading line and then displays a line for each pool. A pool line begins with the pool ID and the name of the pool, followed by a column of statistical data for the processor set attached to the pool. Resource sets attached to more than one pool are listed multiple times, once for each pool.

The column headings are as follows:

id	Pool ID.
pool	Pool name.
rid	Resource set ID.
rset	Resource set name.
type	Resource set type.
min	Minimum resource set size.
max	Maximum resource set size.
size	Current resource set size.
used	Measure of how much of the resource set is currently used. This usage is calculated as the percentage of utilization of the resource set multiplied by the size of the resource set. If a resource set has been reconfigured during the last sampling interval, this value might be not reported. An unreported value appears as a hyphen (-).
load	Absolute representation of the load that is put on the resource set. For more information about this property, see the libpool(3LIB) man page.

You can specify the following in poolstat output:

• The order of the columns

• The headings that appear

Tuning poolstat Operation Intervals

You can customize the operations performed by poolstat. You can set the sampling interval for the report and specify the number of times that statistics are repeated:

interval	Tune the intervals for the periodic operations performed by poolstat. All intervals are specified in seconds.
count	Specify the number of times that the statistics are repeated. By default, poolstat reports statistics only once.

If interval and count are not specified, statistics are reported once. If interval is specified and count is not specified, then statistics are reported indefinitely.

Commands Used With the Resource Pools Facility

The commands described in the following table provide the primary administrative interface to the pools facility. For information on using these commands on a system that has zones enabled, see Resource Pools Used in Zones.

Man Page Reference	Description
pooladm(1M)	Enables or disables the pools facility on your system. Activates a particular configuration or removes the current configuration and returns associated resources to their default status. If run without options, pooladm prints out the current dynamic pools configuration.
poolbind(1M)	Enables the manual binding of projects, tasks, and processes to a resource pool.
poolcfg(1M)	Provides configuration operations on pools and sets. Configurations created using this tool are instantiated on a target host by using pooladm. If run with the info subcommand argument to the -c option, poolcfg displays information about the static configuration at /etc/pooladm.conf. If a file name argument is added, this command displays information about the static configuration held in the named file. For example, poolcfg -c info /tmp/newconfig displays information about the static configuration contained in the file /tmp/newconfig.
poold(1M)	The pools system daemon. The daemon uses system targets and observable statistics to preserve the system performance goals specified by the administrator. If unable to take corrective action when goals are not being met, poold logs the condition.
poolstat(1M)	Displays statistics for pool-related resources. Simplifies performance analysis and provides information that supports system administrators in resource partitioning and repartitioning tasks. Options are provided for examining specified pools and reporting resource set-specific statistics.

A library API is provided by libpool (see the libpool(3LIB) man page). The library can be used by programs to manipulate pool configurations.