eG Monitoring
 

Measures reported by IfxBufferTest

This test reports statistics related to the caching and buffer flushing activity of shared memory buffer pools in an informix database server.

The measures made by this test are as follows:

Measurement Description Measurement Unit Interpretation
Read_cache_hit_ratio The ratio of number of buffer reads to disk reads Percent This measure is an indicator of the overall performance of your database server. This value should always be high.
Write_cache_hit_ratio The ratio of number of buffer writes to disk writes Percent This measure is an indicator of the overall performance of your database server. This value should always be high.
Flushes The rate at which buffer-pool buffers were flushed to disk Flushes/Sec  
Foreground_writes The number of foreground writes per second during the last measurement period Writes/Sec Foreground writes should be avoided. They slow down the performance of your database server. If you find that foreground writes are occurring on a regular basis, tune the value of the page-cleaning parameters. Either increase the number of page cleaners or decrease the value of LRU_MAX_DIRTY.
LRU_writes The number of LRU writes per second during the last measuremnet period Writes/Sec Compare this value with Foreground_writes and Chunk_writes to get an understanding of how the buffer flushing occurs in Informix.
Chunk_writes The number of chunk writes per second during the last measurement period Writes/Sec Chunk writes are commonly performed by page-cleaner threads during a checkpoint or, possibly, when every page in the shared-memory buffer pool is modified. Chunk writes, which are performed as sorted writes, are the most efficient writes available to the database server. Compare this value with Foreground_writes and LRU writes to get an understanding of how the buffer flushing occurs in Informix.