RAC internals

Let’s first discuss how RAC traffic works before continuing. Environment for the discussion is: 2 node cluster with 8K database block size, UDP protocol is used for cache fusion. (BTW, UDP and RDS protocols are supported in UNIX platform; whereas Windows uses TCP protocol).

UDP protocol, fragmentation, and assembly

UDP Protocol is an higher level protocol stack, and it is implemented over IP Protocol ( UDP/IP). Cache Fusion uses UDP protocol to send packets over the wire (Exadata uses RDS protocol though).

We know that database blocks are transferred between the nodes through the interconnect, aka cache fusion traffic. Common misconception is that packet transfer size is always database block size for block transfer (Of course, messages are smaller in size). That’s not entirely true. There is an optimization in the cache fusion code to reduce the packet size (and so reduces the bits transferred over the private network). Don’t confuse this note with Jumbo frames and MTU size, this note is independent of MTU setting.