Oracle Database Cloud (DBaaS) Performance Consistency - Part 2

This is the second part of this installment, comparing the performance consistency of the DBaaS cloud offering with a dedicated physical host. This time instead of burning CPU using a trivial PL/SQL loop (see part 1) the test harness executes a SQL statement that performs logical I/O only, so no physical I/O involved.

In order to achieve that a variation of Jonathan Lewis' good old "kill_cpu" script got executed. In principle each thread performed the following:

define tabname = &1

define thread_id = &1;

alter session set "_old_connect_by_enabled" = true;

declare
  n number;
begin
  loop
    select
   count(*) X
    into    n
    from
   kill_cpu&tabname
    connect by
   n > prior n
    start with
   n = 1;
    insert into timings(testtype, thread_id, ts) values ('SQLLIO', &thread_id, systimestamp);
    commit;
  end loop;
end;
/

Each thread got its own, exclusive "kill_cpu<n>" table, so this setup attempted to avoid competition for buffer cache latches. The tables (in fact IOTs) were created like the following:

create table kill_cpu<n>(n primary key)

organization index

as

select

rownum n

from

all_objects

where

rownum <= 25

;

Again there were as many threads started as CPUs available - which meant 8 threads for the DBaaS environment and 4 threads for the physical host and again this was left running for several days.

The overall results look like this:

DBaaS:

Physical host:

Again the graph is supposed to show how many of the runs deviated how much from the overall median runtime. In contrast to the previous, simple PL/SQL test this time the DBaaS service shows a significantly different profile with a larger spread of deviation up to 3 percent from the median runtime, whereas the physical host only shows significant deviation up to 1.5 percent.

It's interesting to note however, that the physical host this time shows more extreme outliers than the DBaaS service, which was the other way around in the previous PL/SQL test.

The same graph on a per day basis doesn't show too significant differences between the days for either environment (here DBaaS):

Physical host:

Looking at the individual performance of each thread again the DBaaS shows a similar behaviour than last time - the different threads show a slightly different performance, and they also get slightly slower towards the end of the measurement:

And again the physical host shows a more consistent performance between threads:

The next test round will be a physical I/O bound setup.