Transaction Gradually Slows to a crawl! (please help)

Hi, I am running Oracle 8.1.7 on W2K Professional (SP/3). Athlon 1400MHz, 768MB RAM.

note: redo logs are DISABLED for faster updates (it's a staging machine)
I start a transaction
I do an insert in a table (it's not an overly wide table, about 30 fields wide) which results in about 12000 new rows. I then start a process (within the same transaction) which updates each new row doing some more DB processing. As the number of rows being updated hits about 7000 mark, database starts to slow down. I am sure that it's gradually slowing down, but that's when I start noticing it. When it has updated about 8000, it's realy slow. And when it's close to 8500 mark, it's realy slooooww. Then it goes so slow that I haven't seen it finish all 12000 rows (my patience neven seems to side with me).

What gives? In every single case, I ended up killing the session. And that started oracle in a looooong clean up cycle. It is pure hell. Can you please recommend a faster way to deal with this transaction hell? Yes, all of it has to be inside a transaction. Any parameters I can play with? More RAM? ???

thanks a lot!
Mark. Received on Tue May 27 2003 - 18:21:42 CDT