Magnus, I have a car, 350cubic inch engine, it revs a lot and seems to be under load, can you help me? Afraid we need a bit more information. What size database? How many users? Is it an OLTP? DSS? DWH? What size is the SGA verses the physical data size? How about your SQL? Is it well written? Does it use bind variables? Is the shared pool large enough? Is it too small? Is the cache size too small? Do you use PL/SQL? Is it well written? There are several bugs on various versions of Oracle that can cause this as well. What wait events are showing up? Any enqueue activity? Mike Ault -----Original Message----- From: redhat-list-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx [mailto:redhat-list-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Magnus Andersen Sent: Wednesday, July 27, 2005 9:12 PM To: redhat-list@xxxxxxxxxx Subject: high context switching and high load averages slowing down system Hi All, I have a HP DL 580 with 4 3 GHz CPUs and 4 GB RAM. I'm running Oracle on it. Throughout the day I am getting high load averages (6 - 18) and at the same time I see context switching go over 300,000. Sometimes over 500,000. This is slowing the system down to a crawl. My OS is RHEL 3 AS Update 4 with the 2.4.21-32.0.1.ELsmp kernel. Any ideas on why this is happening and how to fix it? Thanks in advance, -- Magnus Andersen Systems Administrator / Oracle DBA Walker & Associates, Inc. -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:redhat-list-request@xxxxxxxxxx?subject=unsubscribe https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:redhat-list-request@xxxxxxxxxx?subject=unsubscribe https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list