I would have never though a write to /dev/zero would work...I learn something new every day. Can you try this test writing to /dev/null? ________________________________ From: Jesse, Rich [mailto:Rich.Jesse@xxxxxx] Sent: Tuesday, December 12, 2006 7:16 AM To: kevinc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx; oracle-l Subject: RE: I/O and db_file_multiblock_read_count I'm guessing that I'm limited by CPU on this IBM JS21 blade's LPAR (MPV, 2 cores max) with an SVC (virtualized SAN) backend. topas showed kernel mode CPU >95% for most of the tests. /oracle $ time dd if=S.dbf of=/dev/zero bs=1024k 16384+1 records in 16384+1 records out real 1m3.044s user 0m0.271s sys 0m42.458s /oracle $ time dd if=S.dbf of=/dev/zero bs=1024k 16384+1 records in