Re: Pentium M and Oracle Performance

From: KevJohnP <nospam_at_nowhere.com>
Date: Wed, 26 Nov 2003 10:11:55 +1300
Message-ID: <vAPwb.9685$VV6.221998@news.xtra.co.nz>

Have run Oracle and a few laptops for learning and configured for people doing sales demos and I would agree wholeheartedly with this. CPU is not the major factor on a laptop for Oracle, memory and disk performance are.

Memory is just a case of getting what you can, 512MB is a minimum >1GB is what you should aim for if performance matters particularly as there is presumably an app to run in addition to Oracle and all the other junk people often have running in the background on their PCs - especially sales people :)

Worth also getting a laptop with firewire. The 'portable' disks that firewire attach are often far quicker than the slow internal disks you find in laptops. Even if you don't go for this initially its nice to have the option of using an external 8MB 7200rpm disk and tests show firewire is better suited to this than USB2.

KJP Dusan Bolek wrote:
> W. Theiss <wtheiss_at_gmx.de> wrote in message news:<MPG.1a2c1d84b8ec9e55989683_at_News.CIS.DFN.DE>...
>

>>Because there are much faster Pentium 4 CPUs available (max 3.2GHz)
>>and the price for the Latitude D800 is quite expensive I am wondering if 
>>it make sense to spend more money for a Pentium M CPU, because we 
>>basically need Processor speed to run Oracle 9i

>
>
> No you do not "need Processor speed to run Oracle 9i". You will
> probably have no problems with CPU, your problem will be these two
> disks. Disks are most limiting component for performance in all
> notebooks. Because of heat problems and need for small factor, even
> most (and expensive) harddisk for notebooks are extremely slow beasts
> comparing with even averages from desktop area.
> And what's the most important perf component in database system? Small
> hint: the slowest one. BINGO! Yes, disk subsystem. So take no care
> about which CPU your notebook will have, because nevertheless of CPU
> used as database machine it will still be a poor runner.
>
> --
> with regards
>
> Dusan Bolek
Received on Tue Nov 25 2003 - 15:11:55 CST