Hi all,
Thanks to Karen Y Byrd, Samier Kesou, Jay Leafey, Tom Ackenhusen, David
Hull, Cathy Chandra and of course Dr. Thomas P. Blinn for responding.
Well it looks as though I can't read as well as I thought I could as
David Hull pointed out:
"It is in the install documentation under system requirements and
release
notes for 8.1.7. And I quote:
Oracle8 Release 3 (8.1.7) requires a system with an
Alpha processor EV 5.6 or later."
Well that's what happens when you confuse the Readme with the Release
Notes and test the upgrade on a DS20 and add a modicum of sleep
deprivation.
Jay summed it all up quite nicely:
"We had similar difficulties and the explanation for why was difficult
to
find, but pretty easy to understand. As I understand it, any Alphas
before
EV56 did byte-level math in microcode rather than in the actual
hardware.
As a result, those operations were dog-slow compared to longer
operations.
EV56 moves these operations into the hardware, resulting in much better
performance. Oracle decided to 'optimize' 8.1.7 by recoding to use
these
byte-level operations.
In our case, we upgraded an 8400 w/ 2 300 MHz CPUs and 2 GB of RAM to
8.1.7
and saw performance fall to the ground! We moved the whole shebang to a
DS20e with a single processor and 512 MB of RAM and it ran better there
than
earlier releases did on the 8400! I know that's not much help, but at
least
it is an explanation of sorts."
We were in the process of trying to replace the 2100A anyway. This has
just made it a lot harder, especially since some of my management think
that Unix = Solaris/Sparc. However I was told by my local Compaq agent
that if the machine was an UltraSparc I, I would be in the the same
position as well - gee that made me feel heaps better.
And hi to Scott Rodgers from somewhere in Georgia who left a message on
my cell phone, I haven't got back to you because it was 6am when you
rang and I was asleep and you didn't leave a return number. Try emailing
me.
Cheers,
Sim
Received on Wed Nov 14 2001 - 12:48:41 NZDT