AIX swapping...

more questions, no answers...sorry...

1. Are you doing async I/O?
2. full 64 bit read write or some hybrid?
3. and kind of "direct I/O" going on?
4. if (1) == 'yes', then what are buffers set to?

-----Original Message-----

Sorry for the cross post if you are the other big list.

I am having some trouble finding a solution to a problem. This is specifically AIX related. Here is the gist.

• Any large sort or import appears to cause paging to take place. I only say large because of the problems, in reality these are quite small objects for the machine we are running, 200,000 - 600,000 rows in the 200-400 MB range. Any way last night I was importing one of these objects.
• CPU wio goes through the roof almost right away. Spending up to 50% of time waiting on IO.
• vmstat shows huge numbers in po, fr, sr and a few block processes in b column.
• hdisk0 goes 100% (swap space is here)
• lsps -a shows swap space is only 40% utilized, never changes. There is only 2GB of swap, admin just increase to 4 GB but still on same disk. Not sure this will really help since it never was 100% anyway.
• Setup- RS/6000 7026-M80 rack mount running AIX with 4-500Mhz processors, 4GB memory, 3-10/100 Ethernet cards, 2 fiber ports, and 2-18.2GB internal drives with RAID. The 2 fiber ports will attach to a storage area network providing access to EMC Clarion storage (see below)
• Oracle is the only app on the box and I have configured about 2GB for the SGA. There should be plenty of free memory.

I am pretty sure we hosed something up with are memory configuration. I see a lot of things about using vmtune to configure various AIC related parameters as too how much memory is can use for various things. Can anyone provide me with the direction to head in examining our configuration and what settings should/could be changed to improve the situation?

Thanks,
Ethan Post

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