Severe, Intermittent Performance Problems - Oracle8173 on Solaris 2.8

I have a customer who has run Oracle 8.1.7.3 on a Sun E450 without problems for well over a year. Last week, with the help of EMC consultants, the customer made hardware changes, which included installing EMC Powerpath product. Following install of the product, the customer experienced SEVERE performance problems - jobs that were running at 10 minutes were finishing in 4 hours. Appserver connections to the database were timing out. Customer uninstalled EMC powerpath. Performance problem remained. According to sysadmin and emc, hardware looked fine - performance on the os looked normal - cpu utilization was at a minimum.

The customer, under Oracle Support's direction, relinked the oracle binaries. Apparently the performance issue 'went away' at the time of relinking.

However, two days later the problem again occurred, though powerpath was not reinstalled. The customer again relinked - and the problem went away.

I'm thinking that this db a timebomb - the problem can reoccur at any time. Does anyone have a suggestion how to go about identifying cause? Received on Tue Sep 17 2002 - 09:13:56 CDT