Question Openedge Db Reduction In Performance On Solaris 11

[Jaun]

One of our clients have applications that mostly do a lot of record reading on Large OpenEdge databases.
Their warehouse application db's are almost 500GB in total and their financial application db's are around 200GB in total.
the OS and database LUNs reside on SAN storage(this applies to their old Solaris 10 and new Solaris 11 kits), both kits and db's run on Solaris Containers.

The symptoms are that on Solaris 11, using either ZFS or VXFS file systems under load reading records from the db's are extremely slow. Running the databases on slow internal server disks proves to be faster.
The symptoms does not appear to occur when using Solaris 10 on the new kit either using VXFS or ZFS.

They are using OpenEdge 10.2B hf36 32Bit.
The Solaris Versions that are used are:
- Solaris 10 update 8 with August 20114 recommended patches
- Solaris 11.2, upgraded to 11.3 with latest available patches.

Is there perhaps anyone running the same config successfully that can assist?

 

[Rob Fitzpatrick]

I only have two clients on Solaris, but they are two very small DBs (<10 GB) on direct-attached storage, so I can't help you with the OS and SAN storage configuration.

I will say though that running large databases on a 32-bit back end is definitely going to limit your performance potential for a read-heavy workload. You are constrained to about 1.5 GB of buffer pool at most. You could have many times that amount available with a 64-bit RDBMS license, provided there is available RAM and appropriate OS share memory limit configuration.

More shared memory allows larger data structures in memory, most importantly the primary and alternate buffer pools. The larger these are, the more data you can cache in memory and the less time-consuming physical I/O you will do when the application does logical I/O against the database. You likely aren't reaching your performance potential on this system, even if the Solaris 10 clients aren't complaining, running with a 32-bit back end.

Also, it wouldn't be a bad idea to upgrade OpenEdge if possible to a more modern release like 11.5 or 11.6. 10.2B is now over six years old and hasn't received the database or client performance enhancements that went into later 11.x releases.