>>>In theory, Oracle's dbwr is supposed to be able to initiate >>>other io requests while wating for any given one to >>>complete. In practice there seems to be an empyrical limit >>>to this, not very clear why. The only limiting factor on dbwr outstanding IO requests is the lower-level io queue depth. If you have really fast IO and really deep queues, you can see dbwr with well over a thousand outstanding IO requests. -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l