Years ago when I was helping a group move from an OPS database to a Sequent, we ran into issues with PQO. These are some of my notes I took when watching the system. Maybe they will help you. Take it with a grain of salt the db version was - 8.1.5. Info on each PX message wait: Currently waiting on:PX Deq: Execution Msg - PQ slave is waiting to be told what to do. This is one of the main events used in a parallel query dialogue as the slave is told to parse / execute / fetch etc.. Currently waiting on:PX Deq: Join ACK - When setting up PQ groups of slaves we wait for them to join the group. Currently waiting on:PX Deq: Execute Reply - QC is waiting for a reply Currently waiting on:PX Deq: Signal ACK - Dependency: We are dependent on the producer. Advise: If the process is often waiting for data then look at the execution plan/s and degree of parallelism. Currently waiting on:PX qref latch - Each process queue has an associated qref latch, which needs to be acquired before the queue buffers can be manipulated. Currently waiting on:PX Deq: Table Q Normal Currently waiting on:latch free It seems that we may be falling into this problem: PARALLEL QUERY DOES NOT SCALE IN 8.1 WHEN # OF DISKS IS SMALL RELATIVE TO DEGREE -----Original Message----- From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Steve Rospo Sent: Wednesday, October 05, 2005 2:51 PM To: Oracle-L Subject: RE: PARALLEL_EXECUTION_MESSAGE_SIZE I found this page which was very interesting: http://doug.burns.tripod.com/px8.html "Partial Message Event * PX Deq: Msg Fragment -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l