II_NUM_SLAVES specifies the number of slave processes that a DBMS server creates to do disk operations. The default is two, but systems having applications with high I/O throughput requirements, many disks, or faster disk drives can increase the number of slave processes. The following example allows each new server that is started to have four slaves:

Stop and restart DBMS servers to reset the number of slaves. The maximum supported value is 30 and the minimum is 0. Setting this environment variable/logical to 0 degrades performance substantially.