Notes/Domino 6 and 7 Forum : Notes_SHARED_DPOOLSIZE and tuning? Gurus wanted.

I am trying to understand the tuning of the Notes_SHARED_DPOOLSIZE and coming across conflicting information.

The main confusion is regarding the variable and what it represents. What I understand so far is that this controls the size of the memory block that is allocated for each entry in the dpool. If the space cannot be found in an existing dpool a new dpool is created, and that in Domino 6 the size of an individual dpool is 512MB. This is a huge amount of memory considering that the documentations I found talks about an average of 7 dpools!

The confusion arises, because performing a SHOW MEMORY DUMP on the iSeries shows the size of the dpool as 512K - not KB or MB.

If a dpool is 512KB then setting Notes_SHARED_DPOOLSIZE=1048576 as recommended in the new redbook “Domino for iSeries best practices guide” – still in draft, doesn’t make sense if the variable is a byte figure. Nor do the recommendations for Solaris, AIX or zOS to set the variable to 4000000 or 8388608 as stated in the few documents found on the subject.

Basically I would like the following clarifying:
What is the size of a dpool in ND6?
Is the Notes_SHARED_DPOOLSIZE in bytes?
Are dpools dedicated to individual processes, such as Server or shared between all processes?
How many dpools are recommended?
Finally, what sort of pool utilisation, from the SHOW MEMORY DUMP data, is suitable and what sort of utilisation indicate that the variable should be increased or decreased?

Sorry for the detail, but I have looked everywhere I can think of, including IRIS archives, redbooks, release notes and the 33 entries Google returns on the subject.

If you can clear this one up I will be eternally grateful.

Thanks - Ian