hpux man page for serialize

serialize(2)							System Calls Manual						      serialize(2)

NAME
       serialize() - force target process to run serially with other processes

SYNOPSIS
DESCRIPTION
       The  system call is used to force the target process referenced by the pid value passed in to run serially with other processes also marked
       for serialization.  If the value of pid is zero, then the currently running process is marked for serialization.  Once a process  has  been
       marked  by  the	process  stays	marked until process completion, unless is reissued on the serialized process with timeshare set to 1.	If
       timeshare is set to 1, the process specified in pid will be returned to normal timeshare scheduling algorithms.

       This call is used to improve process throughput since process throughput usually increases for large processes when they are executed seri-
       ally  instead  of allowing each program to run for only a short period of time.	By running large processes one at a time, the system makes
       more efficient use of the CPU as well as system memory, since each process does not end up constantly faulting in its working set, to  only
       have  the pages stolen when another process starts running.  As long as there is enough memory in the system, processes marked by behave no
       differently from other processes in the system.	However, once memory becomes tight, processes marked by are run one at	a  time  with  the
       highest	priority  processes being run first.  Each process runs for a finite interval of time before another serialized process is allowed
       to run.

RETURN VALUE
       returns zero upon successful completion, or nonzero if the system call failed.

ERRORS
       If fails, it sets (see errno(2)) to the following value:

	      The	     pid passed in does not exist.

WARNINGS
       The user has no way of forcing an execution order on serialized processes.

AUTHOR
       was developed by HP.

SEE ALSO
       serialize(1), privileges(5).

																      serialize(2)