Question : Oracle CPU usage

Good Evening!

We have an Oracle Express database running on Windows Server 2003 SP2. (Virtual Machine running on VMware ESX 4.0)  We find that the oracle process is almost always using a minimum of 50% of the CPU. At times the CPU is upwards of 90% utilization and then the user experience is degraded significantly.

The vendor explained to us that this is normal oracle behavior even if there are no queries running against the database.

I am not convinced that this is the case. Can anyone confirm this? Or perhaps this is an issue that others have seen. I appreciate your help!

Answer : Oracle CPU usage

Oracle is known to be resource hungry. I've heard of such issues but those were in cases where the Hardware was just meeting the minimum requirements. I am not sure of your hardware setup.

But you have indicated that you are running it on Virtual Machine? That could actually slow down Oracle, if i'm not wrong. VM / OS is not among my areas of knowledge But i guess a major portion of the Process time / Memory is shared between the underlying OS and the OS running on VM. Finally Oracle might be left with little. Hence the slowdown?

In addition to following schwertner suggestions, if you could also try to setup on a standalone OS and see if there are any performance variations, it can throw some light.