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

If you don't use bind variables you should change that before you do anything else. A hard parse is a very costly operation. You could also consider to run Oracle 8.1.6 EE which has a facility to convert literals in bind variables.
Also, if you don't have the Parallel Query Option, using more processors won't help you at all.

Hth,

Sybrand Bakker, Oracle DBA

"Chris M" <chris_milner_at_hotmail.com> wrote in message news:L5tr5.37$Om.169819_at_news.lhr.globix.net...
> 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 - 08:36:07 CDT