Oracle question from a Sys. admin, re: Solaris performance

Hi all,

Let me preface this by stating that I am not a DBA, so please take what I say with that in mind.

I support several Sun systems running various versions of Oracle; 8, and varients of 9. We are in the process of getting them all to 9.2 but there are still some hangers-on at 8.

I have been interested in learning as much as I can about Oracle as it may help in supporting the hardware and OS. I have been scouring the net for information about performance and found asktom.oracle.com ...I found an article that jumped out at me, about running 4 instances of Oracle on a system and getting poor performance. This interested me because we have upwards of *50* instances on a single machine with more on the way. Thats not a typo, 50 as in fifty.

The article I looked at basically said that supporting 4 instances would be a "nightmare" because you never know which instance is taking resources. I have a couple questions about this:

• is this true? Is there really know way to determine which instance is using, say 99% CPU?
• are we insane for having this many instances on a system? I think its the result of sale and marketing gone wild...

TIA, Received on Thu Mar 03 2005 - 14:55:11 CST