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Preventing Apps 11i Performance Issues in Four Steps

In my previous article, I talked about what to look for once you have a performance issue
with Apps 11i. In this article, I'll discuss four maintenance activities that you can do
proactively to reduce the chances of encountering certain types of performance issues:

1. Check performance against a baseline


2. Follow a regular purging schedule
3. Gather schema statistics regularly
4. Follow a systematic pinning strategy

1. Check Performance Against a Baseline

• Create a baseline so you can monitor performance in response to


changes or over time. For example, you may create 6-10 repeatable short
transactions of at least 10 seconds each, which represent common
functions and/or areas of particular concern.
• Always execute this baseline test from the same PC and the same location in order
to get consistent results.
• Rerun the test as part of your normal User Acceptance Testing for any
system changes.
• Review and update your performance baseline as part of
any upgrade project.
2. Follow a Regular Purging Schedule

You need to ensure that any data that needs to be purged is scheduled on a regular basis.
The data that can (or should) be purged will vary between different products, so confirm
the recommendations for the specific products you are using. All customers will
generally need to schedule purging activities for the FND and Workflow products.

Concurrent Jobs to Purge Data

Most customers will need to schedule these Concurrent Purge processes:

• Purge Obsolete Workflow Runtime Data (FND)


• Purge Debug Log and System Alerts (FND)
• Purge Signon Audit data (FND)
• Workflow Control Queue Cleanup (FND)
• Delete Data from Temporary Tables (ICX)

Naturally, your business requirements may be unique; review our purging documentation
for suitability and establish your own list of jobs to run.

Workflow Specific Purging Tips

Review the following documents for Workflow-specific tips on purging:

• Speeding Up And Purging Workflow (Metalink Note 132254.1)


• FAQ on Purging Oracle Workflow Data (Metalink Note 277124.1)

Also keep track of number of rows in underlying Workflow tables to ensure they are not
continually increasing, to ensure the data really is being purged

3. Gather Schema Statistics Regularly

In general, running this monthly to bi-weekly should be sufficient with 10%, unless there
is any known data skew. As with any generic suggestion, this would need to be proven
for suitability on your own environment. For example, it is more important to run this
when your data distribution changes, rather than when the amount of data changes.

If your environment is a 24x7 system, you should pick "N" for "Invalidate Dependent
Cursors" to prevent fragmentation of the shared pool

For more details about gathering statistics, see:

• This recent article from my fellow blogger, Avanish Srivatsan


• How To Gather Statistics For Oracle Applications 11i (Metalink Note 122371.1)
4. Follow a Systematic Pinning Strategy

Despite new 10g features making ORA-4031 errors a rare occurrence, it is still
recommended to have a pinning strategy, even with Apps 11.5.10 running on 10gR2
databases.

General guidance

• Monitor X$KSMLRU for candidates to pin (> 4100 bytes)


• Do not pin more than 20% of the Shared Pool
• Review your Pinning Strategy for changing business cycle, such as month end or
overnight batch runs
• No need to pin objects used only for batch jobs
• Also have an "un-pinning" strategy

For more information about pinning in Apps environments, see:

• Pinning Oracle Applications Objects into the Shared Pool (Metalink Note
69925.1). This Note is Apps 11i specific, but you will still need to manually
interpret and act on the scripts provided.

• ORA-4031 and DBMS_SHARED_POOL.KEEP remarks and PIND toolkit


overview (Metalink Note 311689.1) and Toolkit for dynamic marking of Library
Cache objects as Kept (PIND) (Metalink Note 301171.1) describe a generic
automated script (PIND) but this shouldn't be used unmodified with Apps 11i

Conclusion

Running regular maintenance tasks and ongoing monitoring are essential activities to
ensure that your system is performing to the best of its ability. This article highlights a
few of the areas that are sometimes overlooked in Apps DBA schedules.

Related

• Debugging General Performance Issues with Oracle Apps


• Performance Tuning the Apps Database Layer
• Partitioning and Purging Best Practices for Oracle E-Business Suite
• Pinning Objects to Improve Apps Performance

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