I will try to describe the scenario briefly: In a Telecom Production system application receives a certain files called CDRs(call detail records) to be processed by doing some operating systems operations and then database operations like creating indexes and uploading to a Central Database-
The applications server and database is quite obsolete OSF1 and oracle 9i.
Many times the applications turn very slow to process so performance is overheated. Of course There would be many causes for overheated performance, and it is premature to identify the problem at first glance.
So Could you tell me if below theories could affect Performance ?
I run netstat command and displays more than 102 connections some of them established state, some of them time wait, etc. So the question is having many connections could affect the performance of the application?
If I killed and restart connections would be a good idea to improve performance?
Having one or more Filesystem backups could affect Performance too ?
I appreciate your answers in advanced or if u have any other reason that could impact its performance let me know. Thanks
With what you have told us, the application could be a huge bottleneck, the application server could be a huge bottleneck, the database server could be a huge bottleneck, the database application could be a huge bottleneck, or any combination of the above could be a bottleneck.
Running a filesystem backup while running applications that are using files on that filesystem is VERY likely to affect performance of those applications and of the backup software.
We have seen examples in this forum of text processing code that invokes several processes to produce output for each line read from a file containing a few thousand lines that literally ran for more than 10 hours. When that code was replaced by a single awk script with the output fed into sort , the script ran in less than 10 seconds and produced exactly the same output. Could your application code have a similar issues?
To figure out where you need to look, you first need to know what are your major stumbling blocks. Are you swapping processes in and out a lot? (Need more memory?) Are your disks thrashing? (Put files on different filesystems on different disks/controllers?) Are your CPUs running at 100%? (Badly written code or too many users on your system?) Is your network dropping packets? (Loose connections, faulty routes to servers, failing hardware, etc.?) ... ... ...
Thanks you very much for your Analisis and contribution to my concerns. but what do you mean when you say your major stumbling blocks ? i didnt get it.
---------- Post updated at 06:40 PM ---------- Previous update was at 06:18 PM ----------
sorry i know what you meant, i ve got it. thanks
---------- Post updated at 06:53 PM ---------- Previous update was at 06:40 PM ----------
which administrative commands can i use besides top for finding the stumbling blocks you mention and taking account the OS is obsolete ?
Many network connections might affect performance, but right now it isn't even established if you have "many" of them. Connections in the stated of "TIME_WAITING" will not contribute to the load at all and your suggested solution of killing and restarting connections would definitely not help at all.
Running filesystem backups could very well degrade performance but if that is the case or not we can't say.
You might want to read this little introduction to performance tuning i wrote. Most of the tools mentioned there should work for you and most of the concepts explained there should apply to your server.