There are 3 kinds of CPU in the Oracle stats.
Oracle CPU used
System CPU used
Oracle demand for CPU
Starting in 10g Oracle records both the CPU used by the instance as well as the load on the system in v$sysmetric. This is awesome as we can see how busy the system is and how much of the CPU Oracle is responsible for:
col metric_name for a25
col metric_unit for a25
select metric_name, value, metric_unit from v$sysmetric where metric_name like'%CPU%' where group_id=2;
METRIC_NAME VALUE METRIC_UNIT
------------------------------ ---------- ------------------------------
CPU Usage Per Sec 251.067016 CentiSeconds Per Second
CPU Usage Per Txn 5025.52477 CentiSeconds Per Txn
Host CPU Utilization (%) 11.6985845 % Busy/(Idle+Busy)
Database CPU Time Ratio 76.3291033 % Cpu/DB_Time
Now the question is how do we convert these to something useful? For me I put it into the equivalent of AAS and compare it to the core count:
select 'CPU_ORA_CONSUMED' CLASS,
round(value/100,3) AAS
from v$sysmetric
where metric_name='CPU Usage Per Sec'
and group_id=2
union
select 'CPU_OS' CLASS ,
round((prcnt.busy*parameter.cpu_count)/100,3) sAAS
from
( select value busy from v$sysmetric
where metric_name='Host CPU Utilization (%)'
and group_id=2 ) prcnt,
( select value cpu_count
from v$parameter
where name='cpu_count' ) parameter;
CLASS AAS
---------------- ----------
CPU_ORA_CONSUMED .002
CPU_OS .022
An AAS of 1 is equivalent to 100% of a core, so, OS CPU is about 2% of a core and of that Oracle used 0.2% of a core. Not a very active system, and we can look at an active system later, but what I wanted to point out is that this query is missing an important statistic: the demand for CPU by Oracle. We can only add that, AFAIK, by joing in ASH:
select 'CPU_ORA_CONSUMED' CLASS,
round(value/100,3) AAS
from v$sysmetric
where metric_name='CPU Usage Per Sec'
and group_id=2
union
select 'CPU_OS' CLASS ,
round((prcnt.busy*parameter.cpu_count)/100,3) AAS
from
( select value busy from v$sysmetric
where metric_name='Host CPU Utilization (%)'
and group_id=2 ) prcnt,
( select value cpu_count from v$parameter
where name='cpu_count' ) parameter
union
select
'CPU_ORA_DEMAND' CLASS,
nvl(round( sum(decode(session_state,'ON CPU',1,0))/60,2),0) AAS
from v$active_session_history ash
where SAMPLE_TIME > sysdate - (60/(24*60*60));
CLASS AAS
---------------- ----------
CPU_ORA_CONSUMED .001
CPU_ORA_DEMAND .02
CPU_OS .019
So the demand for CPU was higher than the amount consumed. Now the demand for CPU is coming from ASH which is sampled so the accuracy is weak, but in larger sample sets or busier systems it’s pretty darn good. The demand alert us to CPU starvation on a busy system.
I like to wrap all this up into a query with all the wait classes to see the overall load on Oracle including CPU consumed by Oracle, CPU demanded by Oracle and CPU used at the OS level:
select
decode(n.wait_class,'User I/O','User I/O',
'Commit','Commit',
'Wait') CLASS,
sum(round(m.time_waited/m.INTSIZE_CSEC,3)) AAS
from v$waitclassmetric m,
v$system_wait_class n
where m.wait_class_id=n.wait_class_id
and n.wait_class != 'Idle'
group by decode(n.wait_class,'User I/O','User I/O', 'Commit','Commit', 'Wait')
union
select 'CPU_ORA_CONSUMED' CLASS,
round(value/100,3) AAS
from v$sysmetric
where metric_name='CPU Usage Per Sec'
and group_id=2
union
select 'CPU_OS' CLASS ,
round((prcnt.busy*parameter.cpu_count)/100,3) AAS
from
( select value busy from v$sysmetric where metric_name='Host CPU Utilization (%)' and group_id=2 ) prcnt,
( select value cpu_count from v$parameter where name='cpu_count' ) parameter
union
select
'CPU_ORA_DEMAND' CLASS,
nvl(round( sum(decode(session_state,'ON CPU',1,0))/60,2),0) AAS
from v$active_session_history ash
where SAMPLE_TIME > sysdate - (60/(24*60*60));
CLASS AAS
---------------- ----------
CPU_ORA_CONSUMED .002
CPU_ORA_DEMAND .03
CPU_OS .023
Commit 0
User I/O 0
Wait 0
Ideally I’d want the CPU stats to be subsets of each other so that I could have a graphically stack-able set of statistics
now rolling it all together
with AASSTAT as (
select
decode(n.wait_class,'User I/O','User I/O',
'Commit','Commit',
'Wait') CLASS,
sum(round(m.time_waited/m.INTSIZE_CSEC,3)) AAS
from v$waitclassmetric m,
v$system_wait_class n
where m.wait_class_id=n.wait_class_id
and n.wait_class != 'Idle'
group by decode(n.wait_class,'User I/O','User I/O', 'Commit','Commit', 'Wait')
union
select 'CPU_ORA_CONSUMED' CLASS,
round(value/100,3) AAS
from v$sysmetric
where metric_name='CPU Usage Per Sec'
and group_id=2
union
select 'CPU_OS' CLASS ,
round((prcnt.busy*parameter.cpu_count)/100,3) AAS
from
( select value busy from v$sysmetric where metric_name='Host CPU Utilization (%)' and group_id=2 ) prcnt,
( select value cpu_count from v$parameter where name='cpu_count' ) parameter
union
select
'CPU_ORA_DEMAND' CLASS,
nvl(round( sum(decode(session_state,'ON CPU',1,0))/60,2),0) AAS
from v$active_session_history ash
where SAMPLE_TIME > sysdate - (60/(24*60*60))
)
select
( decode(sign(CPU_OS-CPU_ORA_CONSUMED), -1, 0, (CPU_OS - CPU_ORA_CONSUMED )) +
CPU_ORA_CONSUMED +
decode(sign(CPU_ORA_DEMAND-CPU_ORA_CONSUMED), -1, 0, (CPU_ORA_DEMAND - CPU_ORA_CONSUMED ))) CPU_TOTAL,
decode(sign(CPU_OS-CPU_ORA_CONSUMED), -1, 0, (CPU_OS - CPU_ORA_CONSUMED )) CPU_OS,
CPU_ORA_CONSUMED CPU_ORA,
decode(sign(CPU_ORA_DEMAND-CPU_ORA_CONSUMED), -1, 0, (CPU_ORA_DEMAND - CPU_ORA_CONSUMED )) CPU_ORA_WAIT,
COMMIT,
READIO,
WAIT
from (
select
sum(decode(CLASS,'CPU_ORA_CONSUMED',AAS,0)) CPU_ORA_CONSUMED,
sum(decode(CLASS,'CPU_ORA_DEMAND' ,AAS,0)) CPU_ORA_DEMAND,
sum(decode(CLASS,'CPU_OS' ,AAS,0)) CPU_OS,
sum(decode(CLASS,'Commit' ,AAS,0)) COMMIT,
sum(decode(CLASS,'User I/O' ,AAS,0)) READIO,
sum(decode(CLASS,'Wait' ,AAS,0)) WAIT
from AASSTAT)
/
CPU_OS CPU_ORA CPU_ORA_WAIT COMMIT READIO WAIT
---------- ---------- ------------ ---------- ---------- ----------
.02 .002 0 0 0 0
Now let’s run up some load on a machine and database. Take two databases, run up the CPU demand on both and add some wait contention. The machine has 24 cores so there is a definitely a problem when the CPU_TOTAL goes over 24. I’m running 14 sessions each trying to burn a core on two different databases. The first few lines the test is ramping up
SQL> /
CPU_TOTAL CPU_OS CPU_ORA CPU_ORA_WAIT COMMIT READIO WAIT
---------- ---------- ---------- ------------ ---------- ---------- ----------
14.887 .387 13.753 .747 0 0 .023
SQL> /
CPU_TOTAL CPU_OS CPU_ORA CPU_ORA_WAIT COMMIT READIO WAIT
---------- ---------- ---------- ------------ ---------- ---------- ----------
21.989 7.469 12.909 1.611 0 0 .044
SQL> /
CPU_TOTAL CPU_OS CPU_ORA CPU_ORA_WAIT COMMIT READIO WAIT
---------- ---------- ---------- ------------ ---------- ---------- ----------
26.595 12.125 11.841 2.629 0 0 .025
SQL> /
CPU_TOTAL CPU_OS CPU_ORA CPU_ORA_WAIT COMMIT READIO WAIT
---------- ---------- ---------- ------------ ---------- ---------- ----------
27.045 12.125 11.841 3.079 0 0 .025
Historically CPU used by Oracle was derived from
v$sysstat.name=’CPU used by this session’
but this statistic had problems as the value was only updated every time a call ended. A call could be a 1 hour PL/SQL procedure which would thus report zero cpu usage in the stats until it finished and the CPU would spike off the scale.
ASH had always been the most stable way to gather CPU demand, though Oracle has made improvements in gathering CPU statistics. I believe that the time model gathers CPU every 5 seconds in 10g, and in 11g it’s possible that CPU stats are gathered every second
Here is a visual example of a machine that has server memory contention, massive amounts of paging. There is OS CPU being used, but hardly any CPU being used by Oracle which makes sense as it’s an idle database, but what is revealing is the massive amount of CPU wait by Oracle. Oracle only has a little bit of work to do to take care of an idle database but we can see that most of Oracle’s CPU time is wait for CPU time as when it wants to work, pages have to be read back in,

I have my doubts as to the clarity of the layout of the above graph. A possibly clearly graph would be simpling adding a line representing available CPU and take out the OSCPU bars. In the above graph I’ve charted OSCPU usage as AAS, ie average active sessions, mixing AAS of the database with AAS at the OS level. I think a possible clear representation would be to show the Core count line, and draw the OSCPU usage shown upside down from the # of core lines, thus the space from the bottom axis to where the OSCPU reaches down would be available CPU.
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