ASP/OraOLEDB performance

Thus far, I have got terrible performance out of Oracle. Using Oracle 8.1.7.5, plus OraOLEDB 8.1.7.2. I can't find any later 8.1.7 patches - please let me know if I'm missing something.

The scenario is:

COM object implemented in VB+ADO+OraOLEDB for storing session data. ASP page requested retrieves a BLOB containing the session data (via ADO with server side recordsets) and reads this into a dictionary. BLOB is typically 4K.

Connecting to a fairly well spec'd DB (7x10,000 RPM SCSI disks with index/data/logs/os/redo spread about, dual PIII-800Mhz CPUs, 1GB) from a-hopefully-up-to-the job webserver (2xPII 450Mhz CPUs, 1GB) which doesn't seem too stressed, then I get massive memory usage (~100Mb) with only about 12 pages/second. Now with the same running under SQL server I get much better than this, so I assume that I'm missing something. Oracle is running in MTS mode to support the apparently very large number of connections created by the webserver (typically around 500). For comparison purposes, I have a C/OCI app running in the webserver that uses persistent connections, applies DB based security to every request received and gets around 200 pages/second - nearly 20x the performance).

Now my questions are:

1. Why are there so many connections?
2. Why is the performance so poor?
3. What can I do to improve on this?

Thanks,

Mark Received on Tue Oct 23 2001 - 19:34:16 CDT