performance question

My company is currently evaluating Oracle for OLTP. On the server side, we have a Tricord with 4 Pentium CPU's, 512MB RAM, running Solaris 2.5 and Oracle 7.3. On the client side, we're currently using Windows NT 3.51.

I have an OCI application being used to benchmark Oracle performance. A table is created with two columns: key CHAR(5), data CHAR(75). An index is created on the key.

In the first phase, 20000 rows with unique key values 0-19999 are inserted in random order. The data column is initially blank.

The second phase involves selecting 10000 rows by key, in random order.

My question is about the third phase which updates the data column of 10000 random rows. This phase progresses in "bursts". Using a displayed counter, I can see several hundred updates...then a pause...several hundred more...a pause...etc.

What is causing the pauses?

The final phase updates the key column of 10000 random row to 'ZZZZZ'. This phase also exhibits the burst behavior.

Performance in all phases has been disappointing. We have tried adjusting the server configuration from SMALL to LARGE. This resulted in better performance in phase 2, worse performance in phases 3 and 4. Best times were recorded with MEDIUM settings. Any other suggestions or tuning tips would be appreciated! Received on Tue Jun 11 1996 - 00:00:00 CEST