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SOLUTION
Introduction
The efficiency of IO may be measured in 2 ways :
Response Time
Measured in milliseconds an operation takes to complete. This statistic is gathered by Oracle.
Throughput
Measured as the number of operations per unit of time. This is calculated using OS tools for example iostat
on Unix.
As this document concentrates on how to determine whether IO is slow from the perspective of Oracle, we will
not go into detail on throughput and how it is measured. The following document describes how to install and
use OS Watcher in order to collect and archive iostat information as well as other OS information:
Document 301137.1 OS Watcher User Guide
For help in troubleshooting see
Document 223117.1 Troubleshooting I/O-related waits
What is "Slow"?
"Slow" is a very subjective term and depends largely upon the expectations of the system and the hardware from
the user. Users with Enterprise Storage Systems may expect all IO requests to return in 10ms or less while
individuals with an old laptop computer using an external disk connected via an ancient USB 1.0 interface may
well have different expectations!
Additionally, end users will come to expect a certain level of response time for their OLTP requests and reports. If
the response time changes dramatically, it could be due to a dramatic change in average IO response time even
though both old and new response times are less than what may be deemed as the standard reasonable IO
response time (e.g. degradation from 3ms to 9ms may have a significant impact on application performance but
IO may not be considered 'slow' until time goes above 20ms). The reasons for the IO response time change are
varied, examples may include migrating from file system cache to shared disk where there is no file system
caching or changing of system backup schedules such that its IO traffic overlaps with a batch job.
One of the ways that you can detect such changes is to record performance statistics during periods of normal
performance for comparison purposes when performance issues are reported using a tool such as OS Watcher:
Document 301137.1 OS Watcher User Guide
Response time
Hardware does not necessarily respond in a uniform fashion for each IO request; there are always likely to be
peaks and troughs. It is therefore common to measure response time using an average.
Note: In order to mitigate the effects of high/low value anomalies, the size of the sampled data set needs to
be 'significant'. To this end, the number of samples should be at least 1000 operations per hour in order to be
considered reliable and usable for decision making.
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