Oracle 8.1.7 performance on 64-bit HPUX

[Tim Medford]

We are in the process of purchasing a new L3000 server. It will come equipped with 64-bit HPUX. We will be installing Oracle 8.1.7 on this machine.

I've heard rumors, and seen things on Oracle's site which suggest that running the 64-bit Oracle on 64-bit HPUX is actually substantially slower than going with 32-bit Oracle on 64-bit OS. And that the fastest solution of all is 32-bit Oracle on 32-bit OS??

This makes no sense to me...Does anyone have thoughts or experience with this personally?

Thanks, Tim

[Madhu Sudhan_1]

I don't have personal experience with 64-bit oracle running on 64-bit L Class, but 64-bit oracle running on 64-bit N Class. It is working fine with us. (According to my DBAs)

May be the Oracle site is not updated. May be you should try mailing to Oracle support.

Here is the URL for few frequently asked Qs about 64-bit applications running on 64-bit OS etc.

http://docs.hp.com/hpux/onlinedocs/os/osfaq.html

Hope this helps.

Enjoy !

...Madhu

[Bill Hassell · Accepted solution]

I've worked with several customers running 64bit Oracle on HP-UX 11.0 64bit and the results are substantially faster.

But (there's always a but)...this is a 64bit environment, so using the same Oracle init file and same sized SGA will be of little benefit. For 11.0, think 4 Gb of RAM minimum just to get the advantage of 11.0 64bit memory management. The SGA might be bumped to 2 or 3 Gb, but your DBA needs to characterize what will benefit the most with massive RAM.

But a lot depends on the query rate and how many partial index searches can be done. It's also a good idea for any Oracle install to maximize the SGA record cache anhd turn off HP-UX's buffer cache for the Oracle data mountpoints. The added mount options would be:

nodatainlog,convosync=direct,mincache=direct

Don't use these options for rollback logs and archives (which should be on separate mount anyway). Allow the HP-UX buffer cache to handle these records in memory.