Interesting...This was the subject of a conversation here awhile back.
How much would DB2 LUW gain by going multithreaded ala IDS rather
than multiprocess?

Don't get me wrong - I'm a former IDS administrator who has switched
my engines completely to DB2 for primarily business reasons, and I
really like both DB2 and Informix.  Both products have their pros and
cons.  (Again, *not* looking for a flame war!)

However, I used IDS for a long time (10 years) on both HP-UX and Linux.
Once the engine was "settled in" and configured nicely, it was my
experience that stability was just rock solid.

Would IBM ever consider taking DB2 LUW multithreaded?

cheers
aj

fair enough, so can you suggest some method, scripts etc to find out if
we would benefit from those 32 virtual CPUs. I am in process of setting
up the test machine, so maybe another day or 2 till we get a functional
DB2 instance on this machine.

there is one more issue which is showing it's face in this testing
phase. I have configured the kernel parameters using the resource
controls. i am allocating about 25 gb of memory for db2 bufferpools, so
my project.max-shm-memory is set to that number. Now, while altering
the size of a large bufferpool in the sample database, the engine says
that suffiicient memory is not available and the bufferpool size
alteration has been deffered till the next restart of instance. many
times it gives this message even when I am increasing the bufferpool by
a few 100 MBs. The pagesize is 32 K. usage of "immediate" keyword does
not make any difference. Once the DB2 instance is restarted, it works
fine, and does allocate the relevant (increased) bufferpool memory.

This machine will host only one user project and, i have the fair share
scheduler and resource cap deamon disabled.

Am i missing something here?

Regards,
dotyet

Serge,

Almost nothing to do with this thread, but I can't resist because the
topic is very current.

"CPUs" can now be mulit-cored -- ie, one physical CPU unit can have
several CPUs in it.  Each one of those will ultimately have what Intel
calls "hyperthreading."  Then there are "virtual CPUs."

IBM has committed to charging licensing fees "by the physical CPU."
Will that still mean that, even if I have the processing power of 16
CPUs in one physical unit, I'll still pay for one "physical unit?"

We used DB2 for several years running OS/2 on 4 and 8-way servers.  
Since 7.2 was the end of the line for OS/2, I don't know what V8 might
do but we found that the scaling in performance tracked the number of
CPUs pretty close as we would enable CPUs one at a time, especially if
we re-tuned the installation as the number of available CPUs changed.
On the same hardware, we did not see the same scaling with NT4 or W2K
(although W2K was a little better than NT4).  What we found was that
it was a matter of how the 2 OSs handled threading.  The native
process allocation model for OS/2 was to allocated processor resources
on a per-thread basis while Windows allocated them on a per process
basis.  OS/2 could basically evenly employee all the available
processors for a single instance on a single query while the Win model
tended to max out each processor before moving on to the next by
trying to keep each process isolated on a single processor.  In short,
how effective multi-threading is depends very heavily on the threading
model used by the underlying OS as well as on the application mix
being run.  I have no clue as to how Linux would have worked - these
were production servers so corp. was a tad touchy about playing
benchmark gmaes on them <g>.  Our AIX servers showed a similar scaling
response, so I suspect that DB2 for AIX was similarly tuned for that
model.

Sun say so.... where? any link which will give me some more insight. So
far, I have read about positive support/performance for Databases as
well. Look at "Key Applications" section
http://www.sun.com/servers/coolthreads/t2000/.

And i guess it is irrespective of whether you are running OLTP or DSS.

Regards,
dotyet

Hmm - I'm pretty sure (so far) that the Niagra kit will kick butt under
a DB load. I guess we will have to wait for the first TPCs to come out
before we are sure however.