Of course, you could gather system statistics and let the system determine the optimal MBRC during the time of high load. That would actually save you from oscillating between minimum and maximum and trying to guess the best value. What is in your SYS.AUX_STATS$ table? -- Mladen Gogala Ext. 121 -----Original Message----- From: ryan_gaffuri@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ryan_gaffuri@xxxxxxxxxxx] Sent: Monday, December 06, 2004 2:52 PM To: Waleed.Khedr@xxxxxxx; Oracle-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Cc: Khedr, Waleed Subject: RE: db_file_multiblock_read_count and performance the maximum possible db_file_multiblock_read_count is 128. if you set it to this value and do a full tablescan then read the trace file you can get your 'actual' max readcount. look at db file scattered reads p3 values. look for the max value. -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l