Stormsail

Well what better to do on a bank holiday Monday after a working weekend in the office…..yes that’s right I fitted a Pulley Maid Classic Clothes Airer to the upstairs hall ceiling to make use of the dead space up there and be able to dry my clothes in the winter. It was quite tricky to do as I had to find the ceiling joists in order to secure it correctly otherwise I would have just been attaching it to plasterboard! Anyhow after several trips to the loft with a torch, tape measure and a couple of brain cells I eventually did it…… and it worked.

It’s Phoebe’s birthday today and thus it was amusing birthday cake time. I put an order in last week for my friend Karen to design a birthday cake with a rough idea of having a monkey and jungle on the cake. The result of Karen’s design flair is shown above and we both think she’s done a very good job of it.

I especially like the worm sitting on the jungle foliage and Pheebs likes the monkey!

If anyone else would like to order a cake then you can contact Karen via her email address -> karen at cuckoocraft dot com

and a big happy birthday to Pheebs…. xxx

So this was a new experience for both Pheebs and I with a visit to The Vyne to watch an open air production of Twelfth Night by The Lord Chamberlain’s Men. The tickets were actually given to us as an engagement present by Phoebe’s sister Sarah so a big thanks to her for giving us the opportunity to see something different! The Vyne is only down the road from home so didn’t take long to get there but we did have to bring our own chairs and snacks to sustain us through the play. The actors did a very good job of the play and especially hammed it up with some strong vocal projection so everyone could hear. It would be interesting to see another of Shakespeare’s plays so we’ll have to keep an eye out for further productions.

Finally closed a VOS case that’s been open for over a year which was related to high system consumption caused by running multiple Oracle RDBMS’s on a single system. The observation was 80/90% system cpu consumption from mpstat 1 and the following from lockstat profiling:

Profiling interrupt: 67240 events in 2.168 seconds (31017 events/sec)

Count genr cuml rcnt nsec Hottest CPU+PIL Caller
——————————————————————————-
40920 61% —- 0.00 987 cpu[7] fop_ioctl
40920 61% —- 0.00 987 cpu[7] ioctl
40880 61% —- 0.00 986 cpu[7] read_kstat_data
40248 60% —- 0.00 1077 cpu[7] syscall_trap
38780 58% —- 0.00 947 cpu[2] mutex_vector_enter
32478 48% —- 0.00 947 cpu[5] kstat_hold_bykid
32477 48% —- 0.00 947 cpu[5] kstat_hold
13516 20% —- 0.00 1845 cpu[102] (usermode)
6466 10% —- 0.00 1904 cpu[423] syscall_trap32
6169 9% —- 0.00 926 cpu[3] kstat_rele
4738 7% —- 0.00 1626 cpu[96] thread_start
2420 4% —- 0.00 1359 cpu[135]+11 idle
2317 3% —- 0.00 1464 cpu[135]+11 disp_getwork
2122 3% —- 0.00 2764 cpu[101] fop_read
1388 2% —- 0.00 2510 cpu[101] vx_read
1379 2% —- 0.00 2509 cpu[101] vx_read1
1352 2% —- 0.00 2503 cpu[101] vx_cache_read
1267 2% —- 0.00 2459 cpu[418] trap
1215 2% —- 0.00 3059 cpu[128] fop_write
1082 2% —- 0.00 2339 cpu[418] utl0
——————————————————————————-

Originally I raised CR 6734910 – "kstat_hold doesn’t scale well on large systems" to track this but it seemed as though Oracle could do a better job of utilizing the kstat interface which then resulted in Oracle bug and Patch 8531434 – "KSTAT CALLS BY MMNL/CJQ0 INCUR HIGH SYSTEM CPU WHEN RUNNING NUMEROUS INSTANCES" being logged and fixed for 10.2.0.4.0. 11g doesn’t appear effected by this issue. So to avoid a performance hit whilst running multiple Oracle instances on a single host you can either use the workaround of Oracle parameter _job_queue_internal (e.g. from 5 to 30) and potentially loose granularity of performance statistics or patch.

So Pheebs and I took a day out down the road to Andover at The Hawk Conservancy tto visit some feathered friends. When we arrived we managed to grab a little bite to eat at the BBQ and then started wandering around the various enclosures viewing the birds. There were lots of birds of pray there but I wasn’t quite sure who was eyeing up who. A large number of the birds were out in the open but tethered and it was quite daunting to see them up close and personal. Pheebs even managed to don a glove and feed a kite

The afternoon shows where quite spectacular as the bird handlers released the birds into the air so they could fly around circling us and every once in a while catch food thrown by their handlers. We saw Kites, Buzzards, Hawks and perhaps my favorite the American Bald Headed Eagle. The second show was also interesting in that it showed Owls and other birds who frequent the forest environment more that the plains. Again, more up and close time was spent with the birds flying extremely close and I think I count my lucky stars that I’m not something which gets eaten by one of these gracious creatures.

It’s certainly a great day out for all the family and I’m sure we’ll be back at some point in the future to see them all again.