performance problems with many clients

we have a SPARC 20 with about 433Mb of RAM running Solaris 2.5 and Oracle 7.3.2 that performs less than adequately.

what is perhaps particular to the problem is that we have a lot of clients that connect, so Oracle ends up running a lot of processes. at times we have something like 60-70 clients connected and the system is extremely slow.

top looks like this:

  last pid: 26331; load averages: 31.38, 28.19, 28.04   163 processes: 123 sleeping, 39 running, 1 on cpu   CPU states: 0.0% idle, 27.0% user, 73.0% kernel, 0.0% iowait, 0.0% swap   Memory: 433M real, 7568K free, 235M swap, 618M free swap   

    PID USERNAME PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE TIME WCPU CPU COMMAND

  26317 xxxmserv  33    0   11M 2272K run     0:02  3.62%  3.92% oracle
  26318 xxxmserv  33    0   11M 2272K run     0:02  3.60%  3.92% oracle
  26320 xxxmserv  33    0   11M 2272K run     0:02  3.59%  3.91% oracle
  26319 xxxmserv  33    0   11M 2272K run     0:02  3.61%  3.89% oracle
  26321 xxxmserv  33    0   11M 2272K run     0:02  3.52%  3.87% oracle
  26324 xxxmserv  33    0   11M 2272K run     0:02  3.52%  3.85% oracle
  26323 xxxmserv  33    0   11M 2272K run     0:02  3.50%  3.84% oracle
  26322 xxxmserv  33    0   11M 2272K run     0:02  3.52%  3.84% oracle
  26329 xxxwww    33    0   11M 2272K run     0:01  2.19%  3.24% oracle
  26145 xxxmserv  34    0   59M 6492K run     0:24  3.23%  3.23% oracle
  26316 xxxmserv  34    0   11M 2272K run     0:02  2.61%  3.20% oracle
  26315 xxxmserv  34    0   11M 2256K run     0:01  2.11%  2.46% oracle
  26221 xxxmserv  34    0   11M 6516K run     0:10  2.27%  2.08% oracle
  26276 xxxmserv  34    0   11M 5764K run     0:06  2.31%  2.08% oracle
  26292 xxxwww    34    0   11M 2272K run     0:03  2.30%  2.08% oracle
  26278 xxxwww    34    0 5244K 2800K run     0:03  2.28%  2.07% httpsd
  26314 xxxmserv  34    0   11M 2256K run     0:01  1.86%  2.06% oracle
  26313 xxxwww    34    0   11M 2256K run     0:01  2.14%  2.00% oracle
  

as you can see this is a system administrators worst nightmare; a load of processes each using a bit of CPU and loads of runnable processes fighting for a chance to run.

as I understand the Oracle installation is pretty much out-of-the box with a few small adjustments made.

I'm not a DBA and I'm certainly no Oracle DBA, but I would like to find out what could be done. I have heard some people muttering about the possibility of a multithreaded server (does the standard Oracle 7.3.2 server have MT-capability?), but the documentation doesn't seem to say much about how this could be done.

any hints as to where I should begin and what I should read are welcome.

-Bjørn
--

 Bjørn Borud <borud_at_guardian.no>       | "The Net interprets censorship 
 <URL:http://borud.priv.no/>           | as damage and routes around it."
 UNIX person, one of "them"            |         - John Gilmore