Spotlight on Oracle 10.5 - Release Notes

Disk Writes Alarm

The Disk Writes alarm is activated when the level of traffic being transmitted to this disk exceeds a threshold. Sustained high disk activity can cause an overall degradation of system responsiveness.

When this alarm is current you should look at:

• The Page File Transfers chart on the Paging Activity page of the Memory drilldown. High paging out suggests that the high number of disk writes could be due to system paging. Adding more memory may alleviate the problem.
• The NBT page of the Network drilldown and see if any systems are transferring a large amount of data.
• The Disk Queue chart on the Physical Disks Activity tab of the Disks drilldown. If the disk queue length is high on a single physical disk you can look at:
  • Spreading frequently accessed data over multiple physical disks.
  • Spreading page files over multiple physical disks.
  • Implementing a faster disk subsystem.
  • Implementing RAID striping technology.

If the high number of writes is causing an overall degradation of the system, consider upgrading the disk subsystem (controller and/or disks).

Related Topics

Summary Page

NBT Page

Physical Disk Activity Page