SLOB Is Not An Unrealistic Platform Performance Measurement Tool – Part III. Calibrate, What?

Parts I an II of this series can be found here and here.

My previous installments in this series delved into how Orion does not interact with the operating system in any way similar to a database instance. This is a quick blog entry about CALIBRATE in that same vein.
On a system with 32 logical CPUs (e.g., 2s8c16t) we see CALIBRATE spawn off 32 background processes called ora_cs* such as the following ps(1) output screenshot:

I picked one of the processes and straced it to reveal the fact that CALIBRATE uses several processes each performing large-batch asynchronous I/O to do its job:

This should be a revelation to the purists out there. In my assessment I think CALIBRATE may even deviate worse from the goal of mimicking instance I/O than does Orion!
Nobody really cares about platforms though. So this is one of those “for what it’s worth” posts

Filed under: oracle