Re: TNS on Sun Solaris

From: Frank van Bortel <f.van.bortel_at_vnl.nl>
Date: Thu, 28 Oct 1999 15:30:36 -0700
Message-ID: <3818CE8C.DBE32CF5@vnl.nl>

Sybrand Bakker wrote:

> Hi Frank,
>
> Do you have any proof of that? My initial guess is the same as your
> recommendation but my recent experiments showed that using bequeath (a
> variant of IPC) tnsping was up to 8 times slower (around 1000 secs).
>
> Regards,
>
> --
> Sybrand Bakker, Oracle DBA
>

snip

> > No you don't! TCP traffic is about 7 times slower than IPC.
> > Use ipc for local (you can configure the listener to allow for
> > a connect string), and tcp for remote

I have to add some nuance to it. Think it's depending on the machine, OS, etc In other words, how is tcp/ip implemented on a certain machine/OS combination. I tested this with a Unix expert on AIX 4.3.2, S70 as well as F50, and tcp was consistently slower, up to 7 times. You can see it, when running a large query: output will be slower, and sometimes even stop. Beware no tcp tuning was done (either on OS, network or oracle sides). Used netstat, crash and other things to find out about traffic, timing etc.

It turned out, that tcp loopback connections on AIX actually go out to the physical layer, only to find out it's the same machine. The next release of AIX, 4.3.3 should have this corrected, and local loopback connections will be resolved as IPC.

But, as tcp/ip was designed to work over (low quality) telephone lines, and thus has a lot of overhead built in to ensure packets are received correctly, I cannot imagine tcp would ever be faster than inter program calls.
BTW, if the beq protocal is similar like ipc, why the differences in MTS? Can't recall all the details, but IPC uses a listener, whereas BEQ does not?

Anyway, things may differ from platform to platform, and from OS (version) to OS. But I could test this with BEQ vs IPC as well. Guess IPC should be faster, but as you indicated, you never cal tell. --
Met vriendelijke groet/kind regards,

Frank van Bortel
Technical consultant Oracle

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053-4341500 Received on Thu Oct 28 1999 - 17:30:36 CDT