Why is the basis of the assumption that a single Oracle thread has more capacity that that? Trace one of the threads for a while using "strace -c" to produce a summary and you will see how time is spent within the thread. You can also check a summary trace of a "dd of=/dev/null" command. Chances are you will see higher throughput but dd much less processing than an Oracle thread. Kindest regards, Iggy > What is the mechanism which limits a single session cannot have more than> > 30, 40MB throughput? Some sort of SAN QOS? -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l