Few Questions...

[ben_43]

Team:

Happy Holidays. We are getting some new servers from HP and i need some help to answer the following questions from the integeration team.

1. Do you need the hostname all CAPS?
(what difference would that mean?)

2.To use all the swap space, I will need to bump up maxswapchunks.(can someone explain this)

3. Since these servers are for oracle a suggested list of kernel parameters for oracle would be helpful.

Thanks
Ben.

[Patrick Wallek]

1) Hostname in all caps? I would make it all lower-case letters. I've never heard of the hostname in all caps. You must remember that *nix is CASE-SENSITIVE, so upper vs lower-case matters a great deal.

2) Check out this document for a list of tunable kernel parameters in HP-UX 11i: http://docs.hp.com/hpux/onlinedocs/TKP-90202/TKP-90202.html

3) Check out the Oracle manuals for a starting point. They should have some suggestions.

[John Payne_2]

2. What kind of server is this, and how much memory do you have. We generally never use our swap space, because we have plenty of memory. As a result, our swap spaces are generally small. (2 GB is standard now for me on our rp24xx and rp54xx machines.)

Look at the kernel param 'swapmem_on'. If it works in your environment to have less swap allocated, then you have more usable disk for real data.

Hope it helps

John

[ben_43]

Hi:
Machine Info...rp5405, 4 gig memory, 2 650 mhz cpu, 2 36 gig internal drives, 8 18 gig external drives

Thanks
Ben

[Shannon Petry]

Unix is case sensative with hostnames. Windblows is unicase. I'd never suggest you go with all caps in a hostname, as it will make your work in Unix a bit more tedious. Other than that, it makes no difference.

For swap, when you define your system swap,.the installer will adjust swapchunks for you. If you make any modifications by adding more swap later, SAM will tell you what you need to change this parameter to.

For kernel tuning, there is a lot of tolerance, and opinion. Mix this with the fact that not everyone lays their database out the same, nore uses the same size indices, quantiy of anything, methods of anything.

Use the Oracle guidelines for tuning the kernel for minimum performance. See how your system starts working, and adjust from there.

Regards,
Shannon

[Dave Chamberlin]

On the kernel parameters you can start with one of the templates that SAM has for kernels (under Kernel Configuration, Configurable Parameters, Actions, Apply Tuned Parameter Set. I started with one of the OLTP templates. I would make sure your don't use the defaults for dbc_max_pct. You will not to have more than 300M of RAM for buffering. Also many people suggest having timeslice = 10 (it defaults to 1). For your specific instance of Oracle, things like nproc and nfile will be dependent on how many datafiles you have, number of users etc. The oracle documentation has specific suggestions for some others. SAM also has quite a bit of info (help) on configurable parameters section.

[Wilfred Chau_1]

Here are the kernel & patches requirements we use for 64bit Oracle.

Required kernel parameter minimums:
dbc_max_pct 10-20.
maxdsize_64bit 4127195136
maxssize_64bit 268435456
maxtsize_64bit 1073741824
semmap 142
semmni 140
semmns 1500
shmmax 4127195136
shmmni 200
shmseg 120
Required patches (latest tested revisions and are all in our depot):
PHSS_24303 (ld(1) and linker tools cumulative patch)
PHNE_25116 (Cumulative STREAMS Patch)
PHKL_24027 (VxFS performance, hang, icache DPFs)
PHKL_26059 (signal, threads, spinlock, scheduler, IDS)
PHKL_24646 (LVM Cumulative Patch)

[T G Manikandan]

1.It is not required that your hostname should be in CAPS.
It is better to use lowercase for the hostname.

2.maxswapchunks x swchunk x DEV_BSIZE

Default values of swchunk and DEV_BSIZE are 1024 and 2048 respectively.

check this
http://docs.hp.com/hpux/onlinedocs/939/KCParms/KCparam.MaxSwapChunks.html

The default value of maxswapchunks is 256
256*1024*2048 = 512 MB.

With default value 512 MB is the maximum value.

3.One suggestion would be to
Bring down your dbc_max_pct to 8 from 50.

[Steven E. Protter]

On those oracle kernel figures, bump them up some more if you are running any other databases. Software AG adabas and I'm sure other uses the same ipcs.

After starting up the box, use the ipcs command to see what users have how many ipcs.

If Oracle's not getting enough, you're going to have to increase.

In addition to that patch list, you should do the following:

Have the latest Patch Bundle in, because it saves time.

get security_patch_check from hp.

Read this:
http://www2.itrc.hp.com/service/cki/docDisplay.do?docLocale=en_US&docId=200000062976459

Get it here...
https://payment.ecommerce.hp.com/cgi-bin/swdepot_parser.cgi/cgi/try.pl?productNumber=B6834AA&date=

Chose your OS version.

Why Security Patch Check?

Because from the moment that Larry Elison declared his database hacker proof, millionsof people with nothing better to do have looked for ways to prove him wrong. You might as well eliminate OS vulnerabilities as well.