Solaris 9 has introduced a number of resource-management improvements. One of the most important is the concept of projects and tasks. These are used to identify what is called a workload. For projects, this means some related work, such as payroll development. For tasks, it means a group of processes that represent a component of a workload, such as calculation of pay.
The concept behind projects is to be able to identify the separate work-loads that are running on the system and then to administer and report on them individually. Projects are useful when using a chargeback method to “bill” each project for resource usage. This allows the extended accounting software to identify how much resource a particular project has used.
A user or group can belong to one or more projects and also can be assigned a default project, very similar to the standard Solaris group membership mechanism. Project administration is carried out using the file /etc/project (this can also be used in a name service, such as NIS). The default /etc/project file is shown here:
system:0:::: user.root:1:::: noproject:2:::: default:3:::: group.staff:10::::
Table 15.13 lists a number of commands that are used to administer projects and tasks:
More information on projects and tasks can be found in the “System Administration Guide: Resource Management and Network Services” manual online at http://docs.sun.com, as well as the manual page for project.