Greg,

> > Can I assume a i/o bottleneck from the following
> >
> > select * from v$system_event
> > order by TIME_WAITED;
> 
> No.  Wait events may only make up a small amount of 
> processing that Oracle
> is doing for you.

Hmm.... I wouldn't think so. If there were just _one_ overall view that I
could check to determine an Oracle bottleneck, it would be this view. A
rollup of V$SESSION_WAIT is also effective in determining the _current_
bottleneck.

As to the original question: (And as with many other questions) It depends!
The average_wait times displayed by V$SYSTEM_EVENT against specific events
is a good indication of the 'bottleneck'. Just yesterday, I was debugging
'slow response' from a test database. The top wait events were for 'direct
path read' and 'direct path write', with inordinate values for AV_WAIT (upto
932 CS or 9 secs!). This clearly pointed to some misconfigured Async I/O (It
was on a Sun box where async_io default to TRUE). I then had the SA look at
the Async config and it turns out that the Veritas layer was misconfigured -
hopefully this has been sorted out. There have been numerous other examples
- and I am not alone here - where DBAs have used V$SYSTEM_EVENT to determine
the bottleneck. If I were 'S B', I would look at the avarage wait values for
I/O and compare them to the manufacturer's claims. If they don't match or or
not close, then it _may_ be an I/O bottleneck.

I would recommend purchasing (or even stoop to the level of purloining a
copy from a friend!) the most excellent 'Oracle Performance Tuning 101' book
written by Gaja and Kirti from this list. This question is dealt in great
detail therein, and I am sure they would be happy to answer any further
queries.

John Kanagaraj
Oracle Applications DBA
DBSoft Inc
(W): 408-970-7002

The manuals for Oracle are here: http://tahiti.oracle.com
The manual for Life is here: http://www.gospelcom.net

** The opinions and statements above are entirely my own and not those of my
employer or clients **


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