name-service call wait

  • From: Scott Sibert <ssibert@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: Oracle-L Freelists <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Wed, 31 Mar 2010 15:58:26 -0500

We've tried looking around but we've had trouble finding any information on
this.  It doesn't show up in the Reference guide either.

We're doing lots of index creations in 11.1.0.7 non-RAC 64-bit on RHEL5.4.
 By lots I mean we have 478,587 indexes.  We're trying to export from a
9.2.0.6 and import into an 11.1.0.7, doing lots of creative testing to
manually parallelize table creation, data importing, and index creation.

We're doing lots of creative manual parallelizing but today when we looked
in Grid Control for the database we saw lots of "other" waits during the
index creation.  Clicking on that we see that "name-service call wait" is
most of "other."  ADDM complains about large number of unusual "other" wait
events.  ASH shows the "name-service call wait" as 25% of all waits during
the three-hour period.

The box is a Dell PE 2900iii dual quad-core X5470 at 3.33GHz with 48GB
memory plugged into an SMC DMX array.  (Meaning it should be fast enough.)
 This host is a member of a 4-node 11.2 clusterware cluster and this 11.1
database does use ASM.

We're not sure what this "name-service call wait" really means.

A little about the index creation:  we've broken up the DDL (extracted from
the export) into 13 commands to create indexes that match a certain wildcard
criteria.  We cover all the indexes this way and have them fairly evenly
distributed according to size of indexes and how long each set will run.
 Each index create statement has PARALLEL 4 in the command to help with
index creation.  I know we could have up to 52 threads creating indexes on
an 8-core box but it does pretty well.  (It is likely that when we go live
it will be on a couple newer--not-yet-ordered--R900's with dual quad-core
E7440 at 2.4Ghz, 128GB memory and RAC.)  And even when most of them finish
and there are only one or two creates being run we still have this
"name-service call wait" showing up.

Other related posts: