RE: Asynchronous I/O on Solaris

On Mon, 13 Nov 2000, Steve Adams wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> It seems that the issue of asynchronous I/O on Solaris is still alive and
> kicking. Here is an attempt to pull the threads together.
>
> Oracle 7 had an 'async_write' parameter that used to default to TRUE. If set to
> FALSE, Oracle would use the standard 'write()' system call to do synchronous
> writes. So DBWR for example would have to wait for each physical I/O operation
> to complete before it could do anything else. So if DBWR needed to write 1 block
> to each of 10 disks, all those write operations would be done in series. The
> intent of the default use of asynchronous I/O was to allow multiple writes to
> distinct disks to be performed in parallel by a single process.
>

...

Steve, thanks for this very clear and well thought out explanation.

It would take days to glean this information from Sun tech support, manuals, web searches, etc., and more time to create a concise explanation of it.

I still don't have the second edition of Cockroft's book; is any of this included in there?

Jared Still
Certified Oracle DBA and Part Time Perl Evangelist ;-) Regence BlueCross BlueShield of Oregon
jkstill_at_bcbso.com - Work - preferred address jkstill_at_teleport.com - private Received on Tue Nov 14 2000 - 08:09:41 CST