Performance Question

Hi,

I recently moved a database running Oracle 8.1.6 from Windows 2000 to Oracle 8.1.7 on Solaris 8. This was part of a hardware upgrade that was intended to improve performance and scaleability. I'm currently running both systems for performance comparisions right now.

The Win2K hardware was a Dell Poweredge Server, Dual Xeon Processor 700 mhz with 1 GB of RAM. Disk subsystems consisted of 2 internal drive sets, 1 RAID-1 mirror for
OS/Oracle.exe/Redo/Rollback/Temp/System and another drive set consisting of 5 disks configured in RAID-5 fashion for datafiles.

The new hardware is a SunFire 280R, Dual 900 mhz with 2 GB of RAM. Disk subsystems consist of 1 internal drive set that is RAID 1 for OS, oracle.exe, redo, rollback, system, temp. 2nd drive set is an external high performance fibre channel disk array with 12 disks that are configured in RAID10 (stripped and mirrored). this contains the oracle datafiles.

After exporting/importing the data, rebuilding the indexes and analyzing everything, first observation was that the new disk array is VERY FAST. Because the new sun box has twice the RAM, I doubled the size of the db_block_buffers and the shared pool size as well.

I'm not a unix expert. (I am working alonside a unix sysadmin who setup the machine). by the way, he did properly setup the parameters in the /etc/system according to oracle's instructions.

What I am noticing however is that memory reads/buffer gets seem to be slow. (slower than the Dell)

I run a query twice such that it's in the SGA. The trace on the query shows 0 physical reads and all work in "buffer gets"... It is significantly slower on the sun box.

I've checked iostat and vmstat and there is no swapping happening.

Is there any kind of tuning or oracle level parameter I might want to look at or something else to investigate (please bear with my lack of unix knowledge)?
Is there anyway to improve the performance of memory reads? Something in oracle? Something at the OS Level?

or is this simply the way it is? That Solaris RAM is not as fast and Dell RAM? I hope that's not the case...I hope we didn't make the wrong Hardware decision.

Thanks for any advice.
Gavin Received on Sat Mar 30 2002 - 20:19:14 CST