Re: disk activity when no users/transactions

This is just the generic broad question which could be summarized as 'it doesn't work' There can be numerous causes: 1 too much memory allocated to Oracle causing the server to page and to swap continually
2 pct_increase non-zero causing SMON to wake up periodically to coalesce tablespaces
3 job_queue_interval smaller than 60 in init.ora causing Oracle to check for pl/sql jobs continually
4 badly tuned online redologs causing Oracle to checkpoint frequently/log_checkpoint_timeout too low in init.ora (though if there is really 'inactivity' only (which I'm not sure whether I should believe that), that shouldn't happen)
5 sqlnet.expire_time = too low in sqlnet.ora

Did you try to do anything to determine where the I/O comes from? Are you sure it's not paging?
Query v$sess_io for physical reads and physical writes, check v$log_history for redo log switches.
Use perfmon or sar or vmstat to check for paging activity. If you have your complete database on one disk, that disk is the bottleneck anyway, and the activity will never be zero, unless you shut down the server.

Hth,

Sybrand Bakker, Oracle DBA

<cosmin_ioan_at_my-deja.com> wrote in message news:8nsq04$2re$1_at_nnrp1.deja.com...
> hello all,
>
> I'm trying to troubleshoot and eliminate or at least, increase the
> interval at which the harddrive is accessed when absolutely no users or
> transactions are running on the server. Basically, the drive is
> accessed about every 3 seconds (or so) and I believe it has to do with
> the checkpoint process or some other oracle process. Could anybody
> shed some light on how I can reduce/eliminate disk access when the
> database is in no use (other than shutting down the instance, which
> yes, eliminates all further disk accesses)
>
> thanks much,
>
> Cosmin
>
>
> Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
> Before you buy.
Received on Tue Aug 22 2000 - 01:00:58 CDT