Caliper command line options

[placitasmd]

What options should be selected when running caliper to get adequate inforamtion about a system that appears to be having cpu and/or I/O problems while doing a compress of an Oracle database?. A script that compresses 8 databases appears to be causing performance issues and we want to use caliper to try and determine what may be causing the problem

[Dennis Handly]

Caliper may not be the right tool if you have system or I/O problems. You should first look at glance.

And if you are using oracle tools to compress the database, what are you going to do if you identify a problem?

Looking at the caliper web page:
http://www.hp.com/go/caliper
says you can ask for help here: caliper-help@cup.hp.com

[rick jones]

Compress 8 databases how? That is with which utility and is it doing all 8 in parallel? This bare-iron or virtual machine?

[SUJOY SARASWATI · Accepted solution]

For I/O or disk bottleneck, Glance would be the right tool to use. If you are on HP-UX 11iV3, you can try the caliper cstack measurement on the suspect process. It will show the hot call stacks in the process; along with a status information of how much time the process was running and how much time it was blocked.

[placitasmd]

The 8 databases are being compressed in parallel via a script that uses the standard unix compress command. This is on a VM guest. Guest and host are both running 11iV2 with IVM 3.5.

[rick jones]

It isn't clear that Caliper is indicated here. I would probably go with a combination of glance and perhaps tusc for system call traces. If this is a vm guest the compute cycles of compression probably are not an issue (well, 8 in parallel probably presumes 8 virtual CPUS...) but I would be concerned about the number and size of the disc I/Os being performed. You would want to look at that in the guest and the host with glance, and at the app itself with tusc.

You may also want to consider examining utilities other than the standard compress. HP-UX also ships with gzip/gunzip and IIRC gunzip can uncompress that which was compressed by compress. The idea would be to find the utility which did the fewest I/Os to compress the file(s) to minimize the number of guest/host crossings.

[placitasmd]

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