Tuning high sys cpu usage.

We are using sqlldr to load data from ascii files. Many of the files are small (between 2 and 100 records), and can not be concatenated into larger files.
We are going to load some 20000 files each night (6 hours). To be able to do this we need many parallel jobs, but when starting more than 15 - 30 parallel jobs the
sys CPU load increases to 80 % and the user CPU load is 15 % (sar reports).
The sar -d shows that the disk writes are reduced from some MB to 100kB.

It looks as if much of the time is used to internal Oracle routines. A truncate of a table with less than 2000 rows takes up to 90 seconds. Sar .-d reports no problems with disk I/O.

Is there anybody that has experienced something similar and have some ideas how
to solve this bottleneck.

Current config:
SGI Origin 2000 w/6 CPU's and 3 GB memory, 1.5 TB disk (raid 1 or 5).

regards
Kjell Tore Nannestad
Consultant mgr.
ProAct Systems AS
Norway Received on Mon Oct 04 1999 - 13:00:17 CDT