FOLLOWUP: Sun SS10 model 30 Performance

Firstly, many thanks to all who responded to my query regarding I/O performance on the Sun SS10. There does not seem to be much experience in using the Oracle database in a live situation on these systems, and the tuning parameters with in SunOS are few and far between. However, most people advised to check the SCSI bus/disk for the problem.

It was only with the IOZONE results from Greg Limes from Sun (a special thanks) that we were able to convince the local people that there was definitely something amiss. It turned out that they had sent a Wren 7 disk ( which has similar characteristics, but a SCSI interface) rather than an Elite-1 (ST41600N) which has a SCSI-2 interface. This has almost double the internal transfer rate.

While this improved matters (dropped d/b import time from 5 to 3.5 hrs), it is still not as good as its competitors. Further evaluation shows that the disk is operation at about 90 percent utilisation and showing an effective transfer of about 340 KBytes per second (up from approx 260) during the import.

As regards DBE (DataBase Excelerator), a copy was obtained, but was only valid for SunOS 4.1.2. The SS10 can only run 4.1.3 and there is apparently no release planned until Solaris 2.0 is released for the SS10. From the documentation, this appears to provide some improvements, especially if using raw partitions for d/b files (something we are not all that comfortable with).

Benchmark tests performed on the original disk (Wren 7) are still impressive, with times being in most cases better than the HP 9000/817 and IBM RS6000/350 where only query of the d/b is used. Also, where there is only a small amount of writing to disk, the speed of reading tends to mask the slowness of the writes yielding very similar results.

Ray Bartho                              Phone    : (031) 816-2468
I.T. Consultant                         FAX      : (031) 816-2125
University of Natal                     Internet : bartho_at_cc.und.ac.za