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

My questions about monitoring performance is from an Oracle standpoint, not Unix. I am not a DBA so I don't know how these instances are running, if they are crawling or screaming I have no idea.

I know how to use unix perf. mon tools; sar, mpstat, vmstat, etc...and there is no paging going on. Yet. With 50 instances we often have high CPU utilization but that is not accompanied by I/O wait and/or blocked processes, so so far things are ok. These are 4 proc. V880s with 32 GB of ram using EMC Clarion striped LUNs.

I just don't know how far we can push it, there seems to be no end in site as sales is on a rampage to get everybody and their brother to use this product so for all I know we could be doubling ot tripling the amount of instances before we see anything noticable.

For example, one system has 53 instances and averages 33% CPU utilization. Disk activity is heavy but there is no I/O wait or paging. Is it a problem now? Not as far as I am concerned, speaking as a system admin. Compare that to an older E450 with 2gb of ram that spends all day at 100% with the run que in double digits and high I/O wait...so far it seems the V880s are up to the task but I have no idea where the breaking point is, and our DBAs cannot tell me either. Received on Thu Mar 03 2005 - 16:58:58 CST