Slow Datafile Creation on Windows Sort-of Solved

While struggling with some issues surrounding i/o performance on my non-representative foreign script kiddy development hardware (WinXP Pro, 1.5Gb, erm ... some disks and other stuff) I found myself creating and dropping tablespaces on various combinations of RAID0, single disk, cooked and raw disks. Tablespace creation performance was terrible -- bursts of 4Mb/sec write activity followed by stretches of nothing that averaged things out to 1Mb/sec.

Now, while investigating the impact of db_file_multiblock_read_count on read performance I noticed that performance went to hell-in-a-hand-basket when the multiblock read size reached 1Mb. Which is curious, because that's the maximum size that Windows will permit (based on level 8 10046 tracing).

So thinking that sauce for the goose may be sauce for the gander, I found a hidden parameter _db_file_direct_io_count which was coincidentally set to 1Mb. Dropping it down to 512kb had no effect, so I dropped it further to 128kb.

Lo! and the disks did perform. Well, sort of. They're writing at 20Mb/sec -- nothing to write home about, but not as bad as before I guess. Although for two WD740GD 10,000rpm SATA disks, which WD's own utility will read at 100Mb/sec combined, it's a bit off the pace.

Now, if only I could work out why my two disk RAID0 array is no faster than a single disk ... hmmm.