The picld(1M) Daemon on a Sun Fire V880 System May Consume More Than Expected CPU Resources

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Impact

The picld(1M) daemon consumes a large amount of CPU resources on the Sun Fire V880 systems which may cause some performance degradation.

Contributing Factors

This issue can occur in the following releases:

SPARC Platform

• Sun Fire V880 (for Solaris 8) without patches 110849-13 and 110460-29
• Sun Fire V880 (for Solaris 9) without patches 113574-03 and 113573-02

Symptoms

For this issue, the picld(1M) daemon can consume more than 1% of the CPU resources.

An accumulated runtime of the "picld" process exceeding 1% of the system's uptime would be an indication of the described issue. In the example below, the uptime is 2 day 1:46h = 2986 minutes, while the "picld" process has accumulated a runtime of 80:46 minutes = 2.7%, which is too much.

	$ uptime
	6:58pm  up 2 day(s),  1:46,  6 users,  load average: 1.33, 1.70, 5.47
	$ ps -ef | grep picld
	root 100054      1  0   Aug 31 ?       80:46 /usr/lib/picl/picld

Workaround

There is no workaround. Please see the "Resolution" section below.

Resolution

This issue is addressed in the following releases:

SPARC Platform

• Sun Fire V880 (for Solaris 8) with patches 110849-13 and 110460-29 or later
• Sun Fire V880 (for Solaris 9) with patches 113574-03 and 113573-02 or later

This issue addresses the V880 as listed above. However, the changes for the V880 do enhance performance for other platforms such as the V280 and the V480. Installing the following patches can enhance performance on these platforms:

• Sun Fire V280 (for Solaris 8) with patch 110460-29 or later
• Sun Fire V280 (for Solaris 9) with patch 113573-02 or later
• Sun Fire V480 (for Solaris 8) with patches 110460-29 and 111792-08 or later
• Sun Fire V480 (for Solaris 9) with patches 113573-02 and 114864-01 or later

Modification History




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