The good news is there are only four areas, or subsystems as I like to call them, to investigate, and it's very easy to detect the problem area. The four subsystems are CPU, memory, IO, and network. One of those subsystems is suffering.

Using only standard Linux/Unix tools, along with some Oracle performance views, you can find the operating system bottleneck. If you're a Windows DBA, don't worry. At our level, the concepts and terms are very familiar. You'll know which statistic you need to get. You'll just need to find the tool that provides the statistic.

Most of you reading this book will have access to your specific vendor's performance tools. For example, HP's tool is tusc (my guess is Trace Unix System Calls). With AIX and Solaris, you have truss (my guess is Trace Unix System Statistics). If you can find the bottleneck using standard tools, you will certainly be able to do the same thing using tools developed specifically for your platform. So, let's get started!