billmathews2013 wrote:
We're running vcenter 5.1.0b with an Oracle 11g database.
We've had various performance problems such as slow search results, slow vcenter service startup, etc. So I started to look at the database. It turns out it has 854 tables! Lots of VPX_HIST_STATX_XX tables. And some of the various tables I checked like vpx_event_arg and they have over 10 million entries.
Looking at Administration | Database Retention Policy, I have 120 days of tasks and 61 days of events stored. I suppose I could decrease that, but still something is obviously wrong.
Are there some performance things I could ask our DBAs to do manually? For example some tables I could truncate or drop?
1) the number of tables is irrelevant. You can have a million tables, if the DB server is idle, it doesn't matter. A windows registry has like 10,000 tables.. so that's not a good measure. A table is just a place to store data, it only matters how quickly the server can respond and send requests.
2) DISK is the ONLY stat you should be concerned with when it comes to DB performance. My guess is you have SATA drives, and your vCenter includes the DB (which is a no no) in the same VM instance.
I could be wrong, but that is my theory anyway.
Why don't you post your environment, and we can go from there. vCenter , server, ESX host, and disk statistics.