RAC performance diagnostics

After collaborating with many performance engineers in a RAC database, I have come to realize that there are common pattern among the (mis)diagnosis. This blog about discussing those issues. I talked about this in Hotsos 2014 conference also.

Golden rules

Here are the golden rules of RAC performance diagnostics. These rules may not apply general RAC configuration issues though.

1. Beware of top event tunnel vision
2. Eliminate infrastructure as an issue
3. Identify problem-inducing instance
4. Review send-side metrics also
5. Use histograms, not just averages

Looks like, this may be better read as a document. So, please use the pdf files of the presentation and a paper. Presentation slide #10 shows indepth coverage on gc buffer busy* wait events. I will try to blog about that slide later (hopefully).