BUFFERS: How high is too high?

Posted in 1997

Neil Truby — Thu, 13 Mar 1997 21:19:01 +0000 — source: Informix-list mailing list archive (1991-1998)

I'm running OnLine v7.13 on Solaris 2.4. I have 160M of physical memory on my SunSparc 20, and have BUFFERS set to 20000 (or 40M). RESIDENT is set to 1. The cache read rate is great (99.8%), and the write rate is OK (~92%). Reducing the size of BUFFERS has in the past seen a drop in the write cache percentage. Performance is crap, and I've recently noticed that my scanning rate is very high. I suspect that some processes are swapping. So, is it better to have the DBMS optimal and allow server processes to swap (thus incurring swap I/O), or reduce the performance of the DBMS (thus icreasing its write I/Os) and free up more memory for server processes? Thanks in advance for any comments Neil Truby Chase Manhattan Bank Bournemouth, UK