Oracle 8.1.7.3.0 on HP-UX 11i, single instance, not OPS

I have an instance running a batch process, it's fairly busy (steady
thirty megabytes per second redo generated), the top wait event is
"row cache lock" wait taking over 50% of the wait time. I've looked
around in the usual places, and found good descriptions of what it is,
but not what to do about it.

There's plenty of spare CPU capacity and disk bandwidth, library cache
hit is 100%, buffer cache 99.7%. Application is Pro*C and using bind
variables everywhere. This should be able to go faster.

Is there any knob to tweak?

--
Andrew Mobbs - http://www.***.com/ ~andrewm/

30 MB/second?  Busy is a bit of an understatement...  30 Mb/sec = 1.8
gigs/minute = 108 gigs/hour = 2.6 terabytes of redo a day?  That's
pretty impressive - what's your backup strategy like?

Thanks,
Sean

Fortunately, that isn't a problem for me. This isn't a production
instance, I try to stay away from those. :-)

The particular application isn't running all the time, and the others
aren't quite so enthusiastic about generating redo. The shortish run
I made took 1.5 hours and got through 5x30GB log files.  I need to do
a run at least 4 times as long in the next few days, and hope to spend
less than all day doing it.

Seriously though, it does worry me how our customer's DBAs could cope with
backup of some of the redo rates that I see in benchmarks, especially
given the predicted increases in volume. While it's not quite up to
30MB/s yet, it's at least in the same order of magnitude. If anybody's
got experience of backing up instances that generate a few hundred GB
per day redo, I'd be interested to hear.

I imagine the answer involves giving a lot of money to tape-library
vendors. With a load of log groups (say 9), have a 6 drive DLT library,
30 MB/s / 6 drives => 5MB/s per drive - just about plausible I guess
given Quantum claim 6MB/s streaming for DLT8000. That's still 86 tapes
to shuffle through in a day.  ...and then there's data file backup.

--
Andrew Mobbs - http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~andrewm/

Yikes.

Just as an example: probably our biggest "offender" does between 100 and
300 gigs a day.  But we backup four times that amount since we mirror
the archives (at the Oracle level) and take 2 copies of each log to tape
(one copy stays onsite).  The solution is not, how do you say... cheap?
Gotta pay to play.

:)  Sounds like fun.  Except it might be hard to catch up with that redo
stream the day you lose a tape drive.  Redundancy is the datacenter
credo.

Regards,
Sean