Re: DBWR - How Many is Too Many?

  • From: "David Barbour" <david.barbour1@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: "Greg Rahn" <greg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2008 17:27:12 -0500

Good point(s).  And 'free buffer waits' is NOT in my top 5.

On 2/27/08, Greg Rahn <greg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> My first question to you (and others who increase the number of dbwr
> processes): Are you seeing 'free buffer waits' in your 'Top 5' in the
> Statspack report?  If not, it is unlikely that adding more dbwr process will
> yield any benefit.
>
> If you are experiencing high wait IO (>40% is high), then what benefit is
> there to potentially do more IO, by adding dbwrs?  I would think that
> would make things worse.  You need to get to the root cause of why the WIO
> is high.  My suggestion is start by investigating the iostat data (what are
> the IO response times, lun queue depth, etc).  It sounds quite likely that
> if you even use a simple file create test, the IO would be poor.  I would
> use /usr/sbin/lmktemp and do some lower level testing.
>
> The other observation I would make is that if you changed the SAN, and not
> the database, and it worked ok before, then in all likelihood it is not a
> database problem.  No?
>
>
> On 2/27/08, David Barbour <david.barbour1@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > sar is scary (just a small portion)
> >
> > 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).
>
>
> > 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?
> >
> >
>
>
> --
> Regards,
>
> Greg Rahn
> http://structureddata.org

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