I/O activity on /var during Oracle user process

[John Curtis]

I've a huge amount of disk I/O on the system disk in the /var directory during certain user processes in our Oracle application. 100% disk utilization from a single user. I know Oracle use /var/tmp to a minor extent, but what might cause excessive I/O on the system disk from an Oracle process?
I noticed the system disk was heavily loaded and started up glance and drilled down to the I/O by file system, and notice the heavy activity on /var. Anybody have any thoughts?

Oracle not given me much at this time.

Thanks

[Brian Crabtree]

Are you using symlinks from /var/opt/oracle/disk directories to other filesystems?

Also, are you using dataprotector with the Oracle plugin?

Thanks,

Brian

[twang]

How about using "lsof" to find out the exact process casuing the problem:
http://hpux.connect.org.uk/hppd/cgi-bin/search

[John Curtis]

We do use dataprotector, but I'm not familiar with the Oracle Plugin and I don't think it's in use.

[Patti Johnson]

Are you running Oracle Applications? Is this the Reports Server for Applications?
Check the Oracle account environment (TMPDIR or REPORTS_TMP ) to see if temporary files are going to /var.
Also do you have any *.t (report temp files) or *.tmp, *.temp ( forms temoorary files)
If you are running Applications check to see if the uses have any 'debug' profile options set - that will increase the write activity to the temporary output file.


Patti

[Bill Hassell]

It is common for applications including Oracle to generate a *lot* of activity on /var. There may be several processes using /var at the same time which will bounce the disk around a lot. Since you have Glance, select the top disk I/O process, then look at the F screen (type the letter F to see all the files opened by a specific process). To find the biggest disk I/O process, type i and look at the bottom of the report.

Now the open files report doesn't directly show activity but if you refresh rapidly (press Return) you'll see file offsets changing on the busy files.

[Eric Antunes]

Hi John,

Check your utl_file_dir parameter in init.ora.

Set it to something like:

///common//tmp)

Best Regards,

Eric