Oracle 7.2 Performance Problems on Sun E450 (4 way) - SEM/S in only clue!

Well I'm pulling my hair out.....

I just finished an upgrade from Oracle V6 running on SCO (shudder) and moved it to Oracle V7.2 running on Solaris 2.5.1 on a 4 processor E450. Things were going great, queries were executing with lighting speed, the SAR statistics for the system were a thing of beauty and then it happened....

Oracle starting freezing for periods of 5 to 45 minutes. There are no error messages in any of Oracle's listeners, orasrv, or alert logs. The only clue I have is "sar -m" which shows semapores per second (sem/s) pratically off the scale. Running "sar -m" usually shows sem/s around 20-40 and when Oracle freezes the sem/s jumps to 1000-4000.

This instance is having some kind of resource contention problem, but I am unsure what to look for. My best guesses are it has to

1. Do with a conflict / problem using Sql*Net V1 and Sql*Net V2 listeners.
2. It is some sort of latch contention problem. I am tempted to crank the SPIN_COUNT parameter from 2000 to 4000 and see when happens.

If you have any ideas, thoughts, suggestions I would welcome them. Please don't tell me to upgrade to Oracle 7.3, believe me I want to, but I have to remove the Sql*Net V1 dependency first. All in good time.

Thanks!
-Michael George III
mgeorge3_at_wnol.net Received on Sat Sep 05 1998 - 00:00:00 CDT