Do large file systems cause performance problems?

[Kenneth Walters]

Are there any know problems with very large vxfs file systems under HP-UX 11.0 when Oracle is being used? My K box is now attached via multi-pathed FC adapters to a very large mass storage device.

The Mass Storage device internally resolves issues concerning throughput and load balancing so lets leave those issues out of the discussion.

If I have many, many oracle datafiles in a single very large filesystem will I see any problems becasue of file system access resources in either HP-UX or Oracle being strained or exhausted?

Ken

[Steffi Jones_1]

One thing that comes to my mind is the danger of having the filesystem fragmented.

If you add and delete a lot of files then I would recommend to install advanced JFS and use the fsadm command to help defragment the filesystem once in a while.

Adv Jfs needs to be purchased seperately... just fyi.

Steffi Jones

[James A. Donovan]

A large file system in and of itself shouldn't be a problem, but you've stated that you have "many, many" oracle data files in this file system. What you need to do is run some bstat/estat reports and get an idea of what tables are most heavily accessed. Then you can seperate these tables into their own tablspaces and move them onto different disks. Also bstat/estat reports will show you if you need to tune your init.ora parameters.

At a minimum, you should be placing your indexes and tables in seperate tablespaces, and those tablespaces respective datafiles on seperate disks.