Dynamic Intimate Shared Memory
Most applications running on a domain will immediately benefit from dynamically added resources (CPU and memory). The Solaris OS immediately starts scheduling processes on new CPUs and distributes the new memory pages to processes that request them. No administrator action is required.
Applications that use a shared memory segment are an exception. These applications confine their memory usage to this segment. To enable applications to use a dynamically adjustable amount of shared memory, version 8 and later of the Solaris OS support dynamic intimate shared memory (DISM).
A DISM segment can be created with a size that is larger than the amount of physical memory in the system. If this is the case, the segment cannot be locked in memory at creation time. A process that makes use of a DISM segment can lock and unlock parts of the segment while the process runs. By doing so, the application can effectively react to the addition of physical memory to the system or prepare for removal of memory.
In the following section, we show how Oracle 9i can be configured to use DISM.