Yeah, alternating groups is quite common. Actually, AFAIK there is no guarantee that Oracle switches groups sequentially according to group number. Usually, it's the case if you create them sequentially. If I need to rearrange groups than I normally create several "high" groups and drop all old ones. Than recreate from one and up sequentially and drop temporary ones.
I noticed that there are 6 groups, 1,2,3 on disk1 and 4,5,6 on disk2 (shortened for brevity). I'm beginning to think that part of the delays are due to group 2 being written to before 1 is finished, then getting backed up even more as group 3 is being written to while group 2 is still getting flushed and group 1 is still behind as well. I haven't tried it but i'm wondering if I should rearrange the groups so that each group would write to a different set of disks on each switch. I have some doubts that this is the ultimate fix but it wouldn't be extremely difficult to change and try.
-- Best regards, Alex Gorbachev
The Pythian Group Sr. Oracle DBA
http://www.pythian.com/blogs/author/alex/ http://blog.oracloid.com -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l