intermittent "pulse" while accessing 7.3.3.1 instance

We've just moved our production instance from 7.1.6 on an HP I70 (HP-UX 9.04) to 7.3.3 on an HP T520 (HP-UX 10.20). We run a widely-used business package designed for colleges against this db, and we've run the same version of the package for several months on the lower grade machine/OS/Oracle versions. What we experience on the new platform are intermittent pauses. Pauses last anywhere from 2 to 40 seconds, and they appear when users are moving between forms or blocks. But when a pause occurs, ALL Oracle users are affected--it's as if the system pulses. Forms users and sqlplus users all see it. Unix, however, hums along just fine--in tests, we've watched folks happily running Unix apps and utilities while the Oracle folks are dead in the water.

We have very few users right now; we are barely using our CPUs, i/o is minimal. We were careful about tuning the kernel parameters, setting up enough swap, and balancing the load on the RAID arrays per Oracle's recommendations. We did not, however, go raw (and would prefer not to). Our DBA can find nothing suspicious when monitoring the instance.

Any and all suggestions on what's wrong, what to check are welcomed. TIA. Shirley Barger <sbarger_at_ccsf.cc.ca.us>
City College of San Francisco Received on Sat Aug 02 1997 - 00:00:00 CDT