High redo log space wait time

Question

Hello,
Our DB is having very high redo log space wait time :
redo log space requests 867527
redo log space wait time 67752674
LOG_BUFFER is 14 MB and having 6 redo logs groups and the size of redo log file is 500MB for each log file.
Also, the amount of redo generated per hour :
START_DATE START NUM_LOGS MBYTES DBNAME
2008-07-03 10:00 2 1000 TKL
2008-07-03 11:00 4 2000 TKL
2008-07-03 12:00 3 1500 TKL
Does increasing the size of LOG_BUFFER will help to reduce the redo log space wait ?
Thanks in advance ,
Regards,
Aman

Answer 1

Looking quickly over the AWR report provided the following information could be helpful:
1. You are currently targeting approx. 6GB of memory with this single instance and the report tells that physical memory is 8GB. According to the advisories it looks like you could decrease your memory allocation without tampering your performance.
In particular the large_pool_size setting seems to be quite high although you're using shared servers.
Since you're using 10.2.0.4 it might be worth to think about using the single SGA_TARGET parameter instead of the specifying all the single parameters. This allows Oracle to size the shared pool components within the given target dynamically.
2. You are currently using a couple of underscore parameters. In particular the "_optimizer_max_permutations" parameter is set to 200 which might reduce significantly the number of execution plans permutations Oracle is investigating while optimizing the statement and could lead to suboptimal plans. It could be worth to check why this has been set.
In addition you are using a non-default setting of "_shared_pool_reserved_pct" which might no longer be necessary if you are using the SGA_TARGET parameter as mentioned above.
3. You are using non-default settings for the "optimizer_index_caching" and "optimizer_index_cost_adj" parameters which favor index-access paths / nested loops. Since the "db file sequntial read" is the top wait event it might be worth to check if the database is doing too excessive index access. Also most of the rows have been fetched by rowid (table fetch by rowid) which could also be an indicator for excessive index access/nested loop usage.
4. You database has been working quite a lot during the 30min. snapshot interval: It processed 123.000.000 logical blocks, which means almost 0.5GB per second. Check the top SQLs, there are a few that are responsible for most of the blocks processed. E.g. there is a anonymous PL/SQL block that has been executed almost 17.000 times during the interval representing 75% of the blocks processed. The statements executed as part of these procedures might be worth to check if they could be tuned to require less logical I/Os. This could be related to the non-default optimizer parameters mentioned above.
5. You are still using the compatible = 9.2.0 setting which means this database could still be opened by a 9i instance. If this is no longer required, you might lift this to the default value of 10g. This will also convert the REDO format to 10g I think which could lead to less amount of redo generated. But be aware of the fact that this is a one-way operation, you can only go back to 9i then via a restore once the compatible has been set to 10.x.
6. Your undo retention is set quite high (> 6000 secs), although your longest query in the AWR period was 151 seconds. It might be worth to check if this setting is reasonable, as you might have quite a large undo tablespace at present. Oracle 10g ignores the setting if it isn't able to honor the setting given the current Undo tablespace size.
7. "parallel_max_servers" has been set to 0, so no parallel operations can take place. This might be intentional but it's something to keep in mind.
Regards,
Randolf
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