Oracle on NT and Physical File Caching

I am running a simple PL/SQL procedure that reads lines from at text file and inserts them into an Oracle table. I am running Oracle on an NT machine with 256 megs of RAM. The text file is very large with a size of about 60 megabytes. When I initially ran the procedure, rows were being inserted into the database at about 200 records a second. I increased my SGA from 50 megabytes to 96 megabytes and records were being inserted at about 8000 a second. I speculate that Oracle was not caching enough of this rather large text file which forced the read/write head of the hard drive to move considerably for each record insert.

I ran the same procedure the other day and, once again, records were being inserted at about 200 per second. I increased the SGA from 96 megs to 128 megs but that had no affect. I ran the NT Task Manager and noticed that only 16 megabytes of my physical memory were being allocated to file caching. Since the file that my PL/SQL procedure is reading is over 60 megabytes, not much of it is being cached.

Is there anyway to increase the amount of physical memory that NT allocates to file caching? 200 records per minute is unacceptable performance. Task Manager says that I have over 90 megabytes of physical memory available so I know that there should be enough RAM on my machine. Any help on this problem would be greatly appreciated.

Many Thanks,

-Nathan Received on Thu Mar 23 2000 - 00:00:00 CST