Re: What happens during a commit?

The best place to look for the details is probably Steve Adams' site www.ixora.com.au. There are various articles, notes and answers about the evolution of the redo write mechanism there.

In short, though, if you have 20 sessions that do a near simultaneous commit, you may find that LGWR wakes up in time to catch just the first one - checks how far up the buffer it can go in flushing the buffer (which has at least to get past the log for the session that got its commit call in), writes the buffer, and posts the session that it has committed.

At this point the lucky session commits. LGWR can then discover that there are
lots more commits in the message queue,
collect all the information for all the pending commits, and write a mass of log buffer that covers all those commits in one shot, then post all the current waiters.

Consequently, the system-level timing for 'log file sync' waits can be grossly misleading. In the above example, it is theoretically possible for the log writer to take 1/100 second to write and return from the first commit - leaving 19 sessions waiting for that commit; then the next write (which covers all 19, plus a few new sessions) could take another 1/100 second.

In just 2/100 elapsed, your system level wait time could be reported as 0.38 seconds.

Regards

Jonathan Lewis
http://www.jlcomp.demon.co.uk

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  who can answer the questions, but the
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The Co-operative Oracle Users' FAQ
http://www.jlcomp.demon.co.uk/faq/ind_faq.html

• Original Message ----- To: "Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L" <ORACLE-L_at_fatcity.com> Sent: 09 April 2003 09:43

> Hello,
>
> I'm trying to relieve the log file sync wait event in an Oracle
database.
> We're on EMC and AIX, so we suspect no IO problems. vmstat doesn't
report IO
> waits, too.
>
> This is the situation:
> Many users issue many, many commits. My question is, does Oracle do
a group
> commit, or is the sequence of events as follows:
> 1) session A issues a commit and goes to sleep.
> 2) LGWR wakes up.
> 3) LGWR acquires the redo allocation latch and redo copy latch.
> 4) LGWR flushes the redologbuffer to the logfiles (2 memebrs in
parallel)
> 5) LGWR releases the redo latches
> 6) LGWR posts session A
>
> BTW: the transactions are very small (few bytes each, the redo
wastage is
> 125M per day on a 500M redolog volume).
>
> If this is the sequence, then session B has to wait for all these
steps to
> complete before its commit is handled by Oracle. If so, then with a
little
> traffic analysis, it is fairly easy to calculate the maximum number
of
> commits that Oracle can handle.
>
> Please explain.
>
> Thank you in anticipation.
>
> Regards,
>
> Hans de Git
>
>
>
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> MSN Zoeken, voor duidelijke zoekresultaten! http://search.msn.nl
>
> --
> Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net
> --
> Author: Hans de Git
> INET: hansdegit_at_hotmail.com
>
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-- 
Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net
-- 
Author: Jonathan Lewis
  INET: jonathan_at_jlcomp.demon.co.uk

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