PDF version

E-Commerce Provider Steps Up Oracle RAC Performance

By Stephen Faig

GSI Commerce is a leading provider of e-commerce solutions for retailers, branded manufacturers, entertainment companies and professional sports organizations. The company offers a hosted platform for e-commerce that includes technology, logistics, customer care, and marketing services. With over 60 partners, from Dicks Sporting Goods to NASCAR, GSI has to support thousands of simultaneous transactions per second. As a service-based business, response times are critical. Customized applications and services are also an important aspect of the companys value proposition. These, however, can put a lot of strain on a system.

The amount of customization is often directly proportional to the performance problems, Don Nawrocki, senior director of data and storage management at GSI, told DBTA during a private interview. This leads to a constant battle to make sure the platform is stable.

GSI uses proprietary technology for its core e-commerce engine. This engine is built on a J2EE application driven by Oracle9i Database RAC (Real Application Clusters). Customer applications are hosted on a three-tiered Web (Apache)/ Java (WebLogic)/ Oracle infrastructure.

GSI maintains a transactional database and two catalog databases. We manage the read traffic separately, since the majority of our traffic tends to be people looking at the Web sites, Nawrocki explained.

Clustering, however. proved to be challenging. RAC is a very complex environment, Don Bergal, CIO for Confio Software, a developer of performance management software, told DBTA. Organizations invest a lot in these RAC environments and still face performance issues. The wait events can add up and eventually impact the end-user experience, Bergal related. Visibility into these events is critical.

Before Thanksgiving 2005, GSI noticed that the performance of the nightly update to its merchandise databases was slipping. As a result, customer service levels were in jeopardy as the peak shopping days were fast approaching.

The GSI database administration (DBA) team had one week to identify and fix the issue, but standard Oracle tools and traditional approaches did not provide enough detail to isolate the exact cause of the bottlenecks. GSI Commerce turned for help to Confio, whose product, Ignite for RAC, was designed specifically for improving the performance of applications running on Oracle RAC environments. Ignite for RAC adds specific capabilities for identifying and eliminating overhead in RAC. We give them visibility into the RAC, Bergal remarked. For example, is the RAC balanced? Are you getting load-sharing across all the nodes? Where is the RAC overhead? What are the specific wait events contributing to poor performance?

Within 24 hours of installing Ignite for RAC, GSIs DBA team identified and fixed the issue. Ignite directed GSI to the specific SQL and I/O bottlenecks causing the delays. It showed exactly why the RAC configuration was contributing to the slowdown. More importantly, it allowed them to change the Oracle configuration to accommodate the application.

The key difference for GSI, Bergal said, was that we broke down the wait times. This brought them directly to the problem. They could identify the specific bottlenecks, and they did this in production with real data on a real Web site for a real customer.

After tuning the RAC configuration to accommodate the I/O demands of the identified SQL, the merchandising batch jobs returned to normal operation. GSI was ready to handle the peak online shopping season. We got them over a big hump at a critical time for their business, Bergal pointed out. This led them to deploy Ignite for Oracle everywhere.

In fact, both Ignite for Oracle and Ignite for Java are currently used at GSI across the hundreds of servers that make up its e-commerce operations. Ignite is the primary monitoring and performance management tool used by the companys DBAs. It makes every- thing very white box for us, Nawrocki said. That increases efficiency.