Re: DBWR - How Many is Too Many?

  • From: "David Barbour" <david.barbour1@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: "goran bogdanovic" <goran00@xxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Fri, 29 Feb 2008 14:26:01 -0500

Wow!  Ask a silly question - get some really good advice!  Thanks for all
the responses.  Found the culprit(s).  I did have one controlfile in a CIO
FS.  But the big hitter was the SAN.  When I created the standby on the new
hardware in preparation for moving it to the primary, I did so on a SAN on
which a firmware upgrade had been performed.  The upgrade changed a variety
of settings, the most important of which involved a read pre-fetch
allocation algorithm.  After reading your responses (whilst fending off the
forces of management) and doing some additional research, I was able to
point the SAN folks in the right direction.

Much obliged to all of you for helping me keep my sanity over the past
couple of days.  Have a great weekend.

On 2/29/08, goran bogdanovic <goran00@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I didn't follow the thread to the end, but this note maybe can help you:
>
> *316533.1
>
> HTH,
> goran
>
>
> *
> On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 7:53 PM, David Barbour <david.barbour1@xxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
>
> > We recently moved our database to a new SAN.  Performance has just
> > tanked.  Here's the environment:
> > AIX5.3L
> > Oracle 9.2.0.7
> > SAN - IBM DS4800
> >
> > We've got 8 filesystems for Oracle data files.  Redo, Archive, Undo and
> > Temp are all on seperate disk/filesystems from the data files.
> >
> > All the Oracle datafiles are on RAID5 LUNs with 12 15K RPM 73 (68
> > usable) GB drives.  SAN Read and Write Caching are both enabled.
> >
> > A statspack (generally for any given interval - this was for a period of
> > "light" processing) shows me our biggest hit is:
> > Buffer wait Statistics for DB: PR1  Instance: PR1  Snaps: 12609 -12615
> > -> ordered by wait time desc, waits desc
> >
> >                                  Tot Wait    Avg
> > Class                    Waits   Time (s) Time (ms)
> > ------------------ ----------- ---------- ---------
> > data block             278,194     20,811        75
> >
> > sar is scary (just a small portion)
> >
> > AIX r3prdci1 3 5 00CE0B8A4C00    02/27/08
> >
> > System configuration: lcpu=8
> >
> > 00:00:00    %usr    %sys    %wio   %idle   physc
> > 02:15:01      19      19      42      19    4.00
> > 02:20:00      21      25      40      14    4.00
> > 02:25:00      19      18      43      20    4.00
> > 02:30:00      18      18      43      21    4.00
> > 02:35:00      20      24      40      16    4.00
> >
> > We're running JFS2 filesystems with CIO enabled, 128k element size on
> > the SAN and AIO Servers are set at minservers = 220 and maxservers = 440
> > We've got 32GB of RAM on the server and 4 CPUs (which are dual core for
> > all intents and purposes - they show up as eight).  We're running SAP which
> > has it's own memory requirements.  I've configured my SGA and PGA using
> > Automatic Memory Management and the SGA currently looks like:
> > SQL> show sga
> >
> > Total System Global Area 1.0739E+10 bytes
> > Fixed Size                   757152 bytes
> > Variable Size            8589934592 bytes
> > Database Buffers         2147483648 bytes
> > Redo Buffers                1323008 bytes
> >
> > filesystemio_options = setall
> >
> > I'm thinking the data block waits is the result of  too many modified
> > blocks in the buffer cache.  Solution would be to increase the number of
> > db_writer_processes, but we've already got 4.  Metalink, manuals, training
> > guides, Google, etc.  seem to suggest two answers.
> >
> > 1.  One db writer for each database disk - in our case that would be 8
> > 2.  CPUs/8 adjusted for multiples of CPU groups - in our case that would
> > be 4
> >
> > Any thoughts?
> >
> >
>

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