Re: Any experience with running multi threaded server on sco (to save on memory)

In article <3hakau$fgr_at_newsbf02.news.aol.com>, danielkm_at_aol.com (Daniel K M) says:

>We are currently on DEC 433 computers which only support 64MB of ram.
>System swapping approximately 50MB to disk with correspondingly poor
>performance. Considering MTS to reduce memory consumption. Anyone with
>experience in this area?

We are running Oracle 7.1.3 on SCO Unix. The machine is a Pentium with only 32 MB of RAM. I originally set up MTS with one dispatcher and three shared servers. This was ok until the system load increased to the point that Oracle decided it needed a new server to accomodate the newest connection.

The documentation says that Oracle will handle automatic load balancing by starting a new server as required, then shutting it down when it is no longer needed. Our experience was that it took 3 - 7 minutes for the new server to be spawned by pmon. Oracle tech support has not been able to offer any explanation for this. We thought it was probably a SCO tuning issue, so spent a pile of time looking for a culprit - with no luck so far.

Our solution has been to start as many shared servers as will handle our peak load (plus one or two) at database startup. This means we usually have more servers than necessary.

The good news is that we still save resources because each shared server can handle the work of multiple dedicated servers. That is, we need fewer shared servers to handle the same amount of work done be the corresponding number of dedicated servers - a net resource saving.

Good luck - hope this helps

Keith Thompson