[HPADM] SUMMARY: strange system bottleneck during Oracle 7.3.4 startup on HPUX 10.20 K580

From: Ted.Fisher@dana.com
Date: Mon Jun 30 2003 - 10:11:29 EDT


I got several replies after I vented about receiving email from vendors
through a technical
resource list which you can tell I am not fond of. Thanks to Paveza, Gary, Johnson, Craig E,
Aaron Bennett, Medaglia, Chris, IlicR@stentor.ca, Abramson, Stuart, Jack
Gallagher, Denny
Koovakattu, Alex Vinson for the responses as well as to Rita Workman for her original response.

Most suggesting watching memory, swap, kernel parms, and system as well as
Oracle
logs (which say nothing during the hang period). I've reviewed through
those items and virtually
nothing comes up to indicate what might be the bottleneck. SGA sizes were
mentioned by many
and these two instance each have SGA slightly less than 500MB. Since
there is little else
consuming shared memory we are still below the 1 GB ceiling. A couple of
people suggested
checking into Oracle patches that address some similar issues.
Specifically level 7.3.4.4
was suggested. I think we'll try to get the application people to try
this route. The most unusual
thing about this was that something the DB was doing was holding up other
user processes, like
my glance session, for long periods of time. I've never seen that occur
except when there is a
major IO hang (like a dead disk). Yet, systems logs and STM did not
indicate any hardware
failures. Plus this apparently has been happening every time the second
instance is brought up.
Seems very strange to me

Thanks for the help.

Ted F. Fisher
Dana Corporation
Global Information Technology Group
Technical Team
Ted.Fisher@dana.com

My orginal post(s):

Before I vent I'd like to thank Rita Workman who was the only person to send me a real reply. She suggested looking at
Oracle patch levels which I will pursue.

Unfortunately this list has apparently deteriorated from the helpful
technical resource it once was because two out of three responses I
received came from hardware vendors hoping to get some business. Responses
like the one below are not helpful or desired! The only affect it will
have is that I will NEVER buy hardware from them for having abused a
resource that was once helpful to those looking to pool technical knowledge. It is unfortunate that a few individuals can disrupt the
value of this list and don't realize that they are hurting - not helping -
any chance that we might buy from them. I'll not use the list any more
unless I have a dire emergency because it's not worth putting up with the
headache. Sorry for ranting.

       We have a K580 running HPUX 10.20 and two Oracle 7.3.4 SIDs. When
the second SID is started it appears to hang the entire system. Until the
second SID is up the first is completely frozen (user sessions), glance
will not start or update if already running, etc. The load average climbs
to over 12 while the DB is starting and drops once it's up. Top will run
and shows the CPU very low which would indicate that the high load value
is due to IO. Sar shows disk queues pretty low though (=< .50). I can
log in a new session with no problem. The behavior of the system is
similar to when a disk dies and IO's get hung causing any IO related
process to hang. But, I can't find what kind of IO is hanging or why. We
have other similar systems which don't appear to have this problem. Has
anyone seen this kind of behavior before or have any suggestions as to how
t! o identify the bottleneck?!

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