Sun E4500, 4GB Mem, 2 processors, Oracle running like a dog?

Hi,

I'm the DBA for a website and periodically, under heavy load, the server falls on it's knees. using the top utility, it hits 7,8 and 9. If I flush the shared_pool then the load goes down again...so I believe the shared_pool is fragmented. BUT the load still seems quite high, around 1-2 for most of the day.

I think we need more processors, to manage 4GB of memory, and I've heard the standard of 1 processor per 512M of memory. I'm being told by my boss that I can never have enough memory, but I'm sure that's not the case. There's no swapping going on and the hit rates are high (99) in the database. The processor does hit 0 idle time though during heavy load.

Has anyone got any experience of this situation? We're going to try and put 2 more processors in the machine as a test. The only database activity is 'select' and a small minority of inserts (maybe 100 an hour).

Utlbstat/estat only really shows the 'latch free' statistic as a problem when the server is on it's knees...actually library latch contention. We can get around this by changing our code to use bind variables, but I still think we need more processors?

Thanks
Chris Received on Thu Aug 31 2000 - 08:34:08 CDT