Only half CPUs being fully utilized

[Zinky]

2 Possibilities:

1.) SOme of your Oracle DB processes are likely set for processor affinity. I have seen and done this in various TPC and SwingBench benchmark recipes.

2.) The DB is missing a setting in its ora.init file -- which I can't remember.. I will post once I recall what it is.

Cheers.

[Mark H Stewart]

Thanks for the ideas, Alzhy. I tweaked some code from http://forums11.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=6809 to use the mpctl call to display the current processor and locality domain binding type for the PIDs in question, and sure enough, the parallel process PIDs came back with the value of MPC_LDOM_BINDING (103 - see sys/mpctl.h). I've attached the code as getproc.c. And what else is interesting is that all of the Oracle background processes *also* had that flag set, which could explain the original poster's issue.

I've already checked the init.ora values; they look good.

[Zinky]

Kenneth and Mark,

Are you guys still having this issue?

[Pete Randall]

I have to agree with Alzhy on this. It sounds like processor affinity to me. I'm not an Oracle type, we use Informix, but in my world the DBA controls processor affinity, so I would ask them.


Pete

[Kenneth Penland]

yeah, we got it fixed...turned out the problem was with the oracle release that we were running...the DBA's upgraded to Oracle 10.2.0.5 and it resolved the issue.

[Zinky]

Well -- the issue in case your DBAs and you were not aware stemmed from upgrading to or being on Oracle 10GR2 10.2.0.4. 10.2.0.5 likely fixed this issue.

The issue is with NUMA changes introduced with 10.2.0.4. We also had this issue when we moved to 10.2.0.4 release.

The following blog explains it all:

http://forums13.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/postanswer.do?threadid=1443365&forumId=1&closedFlag=1