Re: Taking Advantage of Multiple CPUs

TimKArnold wrote in message
<19980225012700.UAA05684_at_ladder02.news.aol.com>...
>1. How does Oracle take advantage of multiple CPUs?

If the operating systems is SMP-based then Oracle will automatically scale across multiple CPUs.

>2. How can an administrator affect performance other
> than setting 'cpu_count' in INIT.ORA?

SMP is a function of the operating system. If the operating system is configured correctly there is very little that you need to do in Oracle to enable it to make use of multiple CPUs. Oracle detects the number of CPUs at startup anyway, so the CPU_COUNT parameter is not generally required.

>3. How does a developer take advantage of multiple CPUs?

Depends on the application. Multithreading is the first thing that comes to mind (IMO it should be a feature of most applications). But multithreading does not rely on multiple CPUs - it works as well on a single CPU. Some Unix flavours allows you to bind a process to a specific CPU. For example, you can implement primitive load balancing by forking child processes and then let the child process take a look at the number of CPUs and CPU utilisation and then bind itself to the CPU with the lowest utilisation. But I would recommend to let the operating system take care of that as the kernel's load balancing algorithms are pretty sophisticated.

regards,
Billy Received on Wed Feb 25 1998 - 00:00:00 CST