[Orca-users] Orca dying on the vine?

[David Michaels]

On 8/10/2009 5:16 PM, Hudes, Dana wrote:
> Interested yes obsessed no.
> Throw enough hardware at the problem and it goes away: 2 core PIV 
> server slow? Throw 4x quad core Xeon at it.
> 4GB not enough? Try 16 GB.

Obviously not all places have money to throw.  But in any case, it's not 
what I use Orca for, or at least, not exclusively.  I'm not the 
obsessive type to try to squeeze out the next 1% of performance boost by 
over-analyzing my data, but I will use Orca to help debug strange 
problems.  It may be because we're not in an ops/service environment but 
rather a development environment, and our servers are frequently 
hammered in strange ways by overzealous programmers.  Being able to 
point at a graph and say, "your code was opening a bazillion TCP ports" 
is fantastic.  Being able to point at a graph and say, "we just need 
more memory, not more CPU" is also good (though less common), because it 
avoids the problem you cited of "2 core PIV server slow?  throw 4x quad 
core Xeon at it" -- that solution wouldn't be helpful if the slowness is 
actually caused by memory rather than CPU.  While there are ways to 
determine such resource shortages without Orca, Orca makes it very easy 
-- so easy that even a manager can see it. ;)

--Dragon

> this isn't new. I've consolidated numerous systems which were using 
> 10-20% of an E10K domain (4GB, 4x400mhz Ultra II cpu) into a single 
> 5240 (128 x 1.4Mhz sun4v more-or-less ultraIII+ cores, 32 GB RAM).
>