I have written two posts in one, about a performance issue with writes in system tablespace and introduction of a little DTrace stack sampling script.

Have you noticed that DML on tables residing in SYSTEM tablespace is slower than tables in other tablespaces?

Here’s an example, I’ll create two similar tables, one in USERS tablespace, other in SYSTEM, and inset into the first one (Oracle 10.2.0.3 on Solaris x64):

SQL> create table t1(a int) tablespace USERS;

Table created.

SQL> create table t2(a int) tablespace SYSTEM;

Table created.

SQL> exec for i in 1..100000 loop insert into t1 values(i); end loop;

PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.

Elapsed: 00:00:03.09

Insert into table in USERS tablespace took 3 seconds.

Ok, let’s commit and flush dirty buffers that they wouldn’t get on the way of next insert.

SQL> commit;

Commit complete.

Elapsed: 00:00:00.02

SQL> alter system checkpoint; -- checkpointing to flush dirty buffers from previous inserts

System altered.

Elapsed: 00:00:01.34
SQL>

And now to the insert into the SYSTEM tablespace table:

SQL> exec for i in 1..100000 loop insert into t2 values(i); end loop;

PL/SQL procedure successfully completed.

Elapsed: 00:00:08.98
SQL>

What?! The same insert took 3 times longer, almost 9 seconds?

Fine! Let’s troubleshoot it!

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