> We are preparing for a test and loading the database is taking forever. > Paging is high. I/O devices are less than 5% busy. CPU is never more > than > 20%. An Oracle file import is taking over 14 hours. Any Idea's with > this > little bit of info to go on
If you can give the LPAR a little bit of XSTORE, you should see some relief. If XSTORE is available, VM creates a paging hierarchy of main storage -> xstore -> disk. Given that untuned Oracle instances (or instances tuned using Intel-based methods) tend to be both storage and CPU hogs, you're probably watching the guest thrashing and being slowed down by having to page directly to disk. Also, why is the Oracle guest so big? If you only have 16G, having a 24G guest (especially one that likes to page map stuff forever -- like Oracle) is asking for the system to try to thrash itself to death. You may want to consider reducing the size of the guest a bit (2-4G) and using more VDISK to force the Linux guest to page a little. At least get it down to under the maximum size of the LPAR. Don't forget to add additional paging space to the VM system too -- at least 3-4 mod 3s if you take it down 4G. > Also is there a reason for the TCPIP machine to be set at 128M? It's sized for a moderate CMS workload, and it will randomly drop connections if it runs out of space. Fortunately, it's a well behaved CMS application so it's pretty stingy of what it actually uses out of that space, so it probably does no real harm to leave it alone. >Maint was set at > 128M > and IPLing a non shared copy of CMS. We set Maint to 16M and IPL a > shared > copy of CMS. If you remember to reset the default storage size to 128M when/if you need to do service or other tasks, you're probably OK, but I'd rethink the shared CMS. MAINT is what you need to do repairs when you bork the CMS NSS for some reason, and it deliberately IPLs a non-shared CMS from 190 for that reason. Having it log in and fail if the CMS NSS is horked is *very* anxiety-inducing, especially when something is already hosed and you have people breathing down your neck to fix it.
