Re: processor thread binding

Chris Pellegrini wrote in message ...
>I have a four proc sun box (solaris 2.6) running oracle 7.3.3 and
>8.0.4. I want to find out if I am maximizing the utilization of
>all four processors before buying more memory. Is there a way to
>bind an oracle process (an instance perhaps?) to a particular
>processr via /etc/system or one of the init<sid>.ora file?
>
>I'd like to know that I'm processor bound before I purchase new
>400 mhz procs. Or more memory.

There's an kernel API call on some (all?) Unix flavours that allows a process to be bound to a CPU. However, as I've ranted before, I believe that processor load balancing is a function of the operating system. As soon as you make that an application level problem, you're opening a whole can of worms IMHO. However, you may want to look at this API call and I think there may even be a Unix command that can be used for process binding.

But your question is very valid - how do you determine CPU utilisation. My first thoughts will be is to run a couple of sar's to gather some stats. Maybe even pipe it to file and load it into Excel or something afterwards to play with. There are also sometimes proprietary performance check commands on some Unix boxes - they're also worth a try as they are specific for the operating system and the hardware you have. Of course, there should also be some useful hints in the Unix performance tuning manual that came with the box.

The biggest problem with using sar and other Unix commands is to tie all the output back together into a coherent picture. And of course you will need to monitor the box for at least 5 working days (Mo - Fri) to get a some feel of what the workloads are.

Now I do not appreciate these advertisement postings from companies like Platinum in this newsgroup. But that aside, they do sell pretty decent software. :-)

In situations like this, it is well worth to get a decent performance monitoring tool, like those sold by Platinum and others. In fact, I would think that any systems that is considered mission critical by a company demands to have proper performance tools installed. And the Unix SA's I've worked with appreciated the Platinum performance monitor for Unix (they don't like the account managers much, but then hopefully you should have to deal with them a lot ;-).

A final word. Unix SAs and Oracle DBAs have to work closely together on this. You can not IMHO tune Oracle and Unix separately.

regards,
Billy Received on Thu Nov 05 1998 - 01:08:19 CST