Re: Reduce Solaris context switches possible?

On 16 Aug 2002, Alan wrote:

> I'm looking for an enhancement I may make to my Solaris 2.8 OS.

That guy should have been aboe to tell you that it's Solaris 8, not Solaris 2.8.

> According to some guy I met at a user group,
> I may lengthen the slice of time given to each process currently
> resident in the run queue.

As a rule of thumb, it doesn't sound likely. The Solaris scheduler is pretty good, you know...

> The idea behind this enhancement is that it improves the performance
> of some database related processes like the Oracle kernel.

If a process needs the CPU, it will get it, regardless of its time slice. Unless other, higher priority processes need to run.

> I assume the performance boost comes as a result of fewer context
> switches per second.

How long do you think a context switch takes? To paraphrase Adrian Cockcroft, if you think you have a performance problem, you probably have a slow disk subsystem. I'd look very closely at that, considering that you're talking about Oracle.

In otherwords, don't waste your time trying to save a few nanoseconds on context switching, when you could be saving milliseconds by optimising your disk setup.

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