Parallel Query Idle Wait - Slave

Platform - Oracle 8.0.6 EE on Win NT

Customer complains that performance on a particular query went from "a couple of minutes" to "3 or 4 hours"

Ran a utlbstat (this is 8.0, so don't have statspack), started the query, let it run 10 minutes, killed it and ran utlestat. Fed results to Oraperf.

99.63% of response time was wait time. 90.34% of wait time was "Parallel Query Idle Wait - Slave" Search of MetaLink turned up several items that said essentially "this is an idle event, don't worry about it." A Google search of this ng archive turned up nothing.

Is this wait event a red herring? If not, where do I go from here? I've never had a need to look at tuning parallel processing. Relevent init parms are:

parallel_adaptive_multi_user = false
parallel_broadcast_enabled = false
parallel_default_max_instances=0
parallel_execution_message_size=2148
parallel_instance_group=[null]
parallel_max_servers=16
parallel_min_message_pool=154656
parallel_min_percent=0
parallel_min_servers=8
parallel_server=false
parallel_server_idle_time=5
parallel_transaction_resource_timeout=300

init.ora was last modified 15 months ago. Problem began 3 weeks ago. Received on Fri Apr 25 2003 - 06:49:32 CDT