Date:     May 13, 1996            Time:    07:22
From:    Jerry Lawson
    ITT Hartford Insurance Group
    (203) 547-2960    jlawson AT itthartford DOT com
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Last Friday afternoon we had a decent sized recovery of an Oracle Data Base on
Last Friday afternoon we had a decent sized recovery of an Oracle Data Base on
a NetWare server.  The major part of the restore was 17 files that had a
combined size exceeding 600MB; the recovery time was approximately 1hr 20 min.
 The bad news was that we discovered (after the first time we restored the
files) that the backups were taking place while the data bases were online!
This led to some interesting situations, including what appeared to be a
skipped log backup.  We were, however, able to get a set of files that matched
 and were usable once restored.

There were two things about the restore that bothered me.

1.  From the beginning of the restore process, processor utilization hit 100%,
and stayed there pretty consistently.  The server had approximately 50 active
users (seen in the monitor screen).  All of them complained of slow to no
response.  Fortunately, it was late Friday and they all wanted to go home
early anyway.  I was perplexed by the high utilization - the NetWare machine
is a 3.12 machine, and was running version 2.1.0.2 of ADSM.  I believe we have
Processorutilization set at 25, so I was at a loss to explain why no one could
gain access to the server.  Is this value too high for a restore?  I should
add that there is a fair amount of compression on the files - the actual
amount of data transferred was 46M to get 600M restored.

2.  There was a long delay at the end of the restore of several files -
sometimes as much as 7 minutes.  What we observed was the restore was
proceeding - we were getting a string of dots across the screen - and then the
process stopped - no more dots.  Switching to the monitor showed continued
high utilization.  I got on the ADSM Admin, and a Q Session command showed the
session in an Idle Wait condition.  (There was no media waits - all of the
files were on a single volume).  This occurred most notable after several
large files (100MB), but also on some smaller ones as well.  Any ideas on what
was happening?

Jerry Lawson
jlawson AT itthartford DOT com


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Jerry Lawson
ITT Hartford Insurance Group
jlawson AT itthartford DOT com