Newbie: O8.0.4 Poor performance on NT 4

All,
We are doing some scalability testing of a multimedia application built with Oracle 8.0.4, OWS 2.1, and your Cartridge on a high-end NT box (4*400Mhz & 2GB RAM). We simulate users with "virtual" clients that generate network traffic (the http calls). We are running in dedicated server mode.

As the number of users increases the response time decreases (as expected). However, we are not getting very effective performance from the hardware. For example:

When 50 users present the application with 100 requests per minute. The first 5 or 10 users get their response within 5 seconds; after that the requests begin to backup until all requests take about 30 seconds to come back. It appears that the WRB is creating multiple processes, (wrbproc.exe) as it should be, but they are not being serviced very quickly by the DB -- as the oracle80.exe process NEVER spawns more than 2 - 5 additional threads. Shouldn't Oracle spawn an additional thread to service each wrbproc? If we mix in requests for static HTML files they are returned immediately (as expected). Also 50 users requesting 100 HTML files per minute results in an under 5 second response time for all. The delay only occurs when calling a stored procedure -- whether it embeds data from the database or not.

Also, we get the same response times with all 4 CPUs installed in the server as we do if only 1 CPU is installed!?! There is also significant CPU idle time >50% while all these requests are backed up -- what's going on is it Oracle or NT (or more than likely me)???

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

--David Smith
dsmith_at_hpti.com Received on Tue Feb 23 1999 - 16:53:23 CST