RMAN Backup and Recovery

Optimization
An Oracle White Paper
March 2005

RMAN Backup and Recovery Optimization

Introduction ....................................................................................................... 3
RMAN Overview .............................................................................................. 4
How RMAN Takes a Backup ..................................................................... 4
Factors Affecting Backup and Restore Performance................................... 4
Speed Of Backup Devices........................................................................... 5
Parallelism ...................................................................................................... 5
Tape Backup ............................................................................................. 5
Disk Backup.............................................................................................. 6
General Information................................................................................ 6
Backup Set Multiplexing .............................................................................. 6
Buffer Sizes.................................................................................................... 7
Backup Reading Buffers.......................................................................... 8
Backup Writing Buffers........................................................................... 9
Where is the memory allocated from?................................................. 10
Synchronous vs Asynchronous I/O ........................................................ 10
Use of Incremental Backups ..................................................................... 11
Use of Block Checking .............................................................................. 13
Checksums .............................................................................................. 13
Logical Block Checks............................................................................. 13
Use of Compression................................................................................... 14
Factors Affecting Media Recovery Performance........................................ 15
The Number of Archived Logs and/or Incrementals Applied ........... 15
Number of Data Files Needing Recovery............................................... 16
Archived Log Location .............................................................................. 17
Parallel Recovery......................................................................................... 17
General Database Performance................................................................ 18
Conclusion........................................................................................................ 19

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RMAN Backup and Recovery Optimization

INTRODUCTION

Backup performance is typically scrutinized when backups start to exceed their

alloted time windows. With the new DURATION parameter in Oracle Database
10g, RMAN can be told how much time to spend on the backup, and when this
time has expired, the backup will stop. The next time the backup is run, RMAN will
pickup from where it left off. Though this feature allows the total backup window
to be segmented into several smaller windows, the problem of optimizing overall
backup performance still remains.
Restore and recovery performance issues are often brought to light when it is too
late, i.e. the database has been recovering for 6 hours now, and it still hasnt
finished, but it needs to be available now!
This paper explains the factors that affect the performance of backup, restore, and
recovery operations, and provides guidance on proactively monitoring and
improving that performance.
This paper assumes that the reader uses Recovery Manager (RMAN) to manage the
backups of their Oracle databases, and so performance of user-managed backups
(non-RMAN) will not be discussed. All tests carried out in this paper use Oracle
Database 10g Release 10.1.0.3 on a dual Intel processor machine running Suse
Linux Enterprise Server 7. This was not a high end or large server, so the tests
conducted only illustrate on a simple basis, the areas of optimization.
Throughout this paper the amount of CPU time used for an activity is shown
during testing. This value is retrieved from v$sesstat for the statistic CPU
used by this session (statistic #12) where the session is the one created
when a channel is allocated by RMAN. This shows the amount of CPU time used
for reading, physical and logical block checking, compression, and writing to the
backup set.

NOTE: The test results shown in this paper are not official Oracle
performance figures and are simply used to demonstrate the performance
characteristics of backup, restore, and recovery operations. Your results will
vary greatly depending on your own hardware, operating system, network,
and database configurations.

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RMAN OVERVIEW

RMAN was introduced with Oracle8 as a tool that allows the DBA to easily
manage backup and recovery for their Oracle databases. There have been
improvements with each new release of Oracle and because it is built into the
RDBMS kernel, it can take advantage of various database features such as
corruption validation checks.
For a thorough description of the RMAN architecture and features, refer to the
Oracle Database Backup and Recovery Basics Guide. This paper assumes that the
reader understands the basic RMAN components and terminology, and will only
discuss relevant features when appropriate.
NOTE: In this paper, the term backup performance views corresponds to
the V$BACKUP_SYNC_IO or V$BACKUP_ASYNC_IO views,
depending on whether synchronous or asynchronous I/O is being used.

How RMAN Takes a Backup

RMAN allows the DBA to take a backup of data files, control files, SPFILE and
archivelog files. The backups created are stored in one of two formats:

Image Copies This is an exact, bit-for-bit copy of the file being backed
up that is stored only on disk, never written directly to tape. As tuning the
performance of image copy creation is a simple disk-to-disk copy exercise,
image copies will not be discussed further in this paper.

Backup Sets This is a logical grouping of data files, archived logs, control
files or SPFILE (data files and archived logs cannot be combined in the
same backup set). Backup sets can be created on disk or tape using the
Media Management Layer (MML), which is a software layer that provides
the interface from RMAN to a tape library. This is the type of backup
discussed throughout this paper.

A backup set can contain multiple files, whose data is multiplexed together. When
creating a backup set, RMAN does not back up blocks that have never been
formatted.
FACTORS AFFECTING BACKUP AND RESTORE PERFORMANCE

There are a number of factors that can influence backup and restore performance:

Speed of Backup Devices

Parallelism

Backup Set Multiplexing

Buffer Sizes

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Synchronous vs Asynchronous I/O

Use of Incremental Backups

Use of Block Checking

Use of Compression

The process of applying recovery to the database using archived logs and
incremental backups will be discussed in a later section.
Speed Of Backup Devices

The maximum speed at which a backup can run will be dictated by:
Max Mb/Sec = min(disk read Mb/s, tape write Mb/s)
It is not possible to make a backup to go faster than this, period.
The first part of a backup, as already explained, involves reading each data
file/archived log file and placing the blocks into read buffers. The maximum speed
at which these buffers can be filled depends on the physical location/caching and
maximum read speed of the disks. The throughput being achieved through RMAN
from the disks can be monitored using the effective_bytes_per_second
column in the Backup performance views, where type=INPUT. If this is
lower than the expected read rate advertised for your disks, then you need to start
investigating why this is so by looking at OS data like sar and at disk monitoring
data of the particular disk/logical volume manager implementation.
The speed of the devices used for writing the backup can also be monitored using
the backup performance views, in the effective_bytes_per_second
column where type=OUTPUT. If you are seeing a slower I/O rate than expected
on the tape devices, then you need to look at the MML and drive options to tune
the physical tape block size (normally the larger the better), the tape compression
(this can slow down backups), and to make sure you are streaming data to the drive.
Increasing the number of files multiplexed into each channel may increase the tape
streaming abilities, but it will reduce the performance of restoring a subset of the
data files contained in one backup set.
Parallelism

A channel is the communication pathway from RMAN to the physical backup

device, whether it is disk or tape. This section discusses best practices for allocating
channels for tape and disk backup.
Tape Backup

It is recommended to allocate one channel per physical tape device available for the
backup.
Each channel creates its own backup set. If you only have two tape devices but you
allocate three channels, depending on the MML, either one channel will always be

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waiting for a device to finish on another channel before it can begin creating its
backup set or two backup sets will be interlaced onto the tape. Interlacing backups
in this way may provide shorter backup times but will lengthen restore times
dramatically.
Disk Backup

It is recommended to allocate one channel per physical device that the output is
striped over.
General Information

When using automatic channel parallelism, RMAN attempts to distribute the data
files amongst the channels with the aim of creating evenly sized backup sets, and
will:

Split up the number of files to be backed up amongst the channels

Try to even out the disks being read containing the files amongst the
channels

Attempt to make each backup set the same size

Automatic channel parallelism is documented in Chapter 2 of the Backup and

Recovery Advanced Users Guide.
Backup Set Multiplexing

Adjusting the filesperset backup option may make differences to the speed of
backups but it can make major difference with restore times when not restoring all
the data files. This is demonstrated with a test taking several level 0 backups with a
different number of files per set. A data file is then deleted and timing information
is gathered when using each of the backup sets to restore it. The results are shown
below in Table 3:

#Files in
BS
8
4
2
1

BS Size
(blocks)
702320
658221
132773
97730

Restored
File size
(blocks)
97727
97727
97727
97727

Time
(secs)
132
110
82
74

CPU
(Secs)
39.42
36.92
29.92
25.62

Table 3: Effects of filesperset on restore speed

It is obvious from the results that by keeping the number of filesperset to a smaller
value, the speed at which the file can be restored is decreased. If the restore
involved the entire database, having more backup sets may increase the time it takes
to restore. This is due to more requests being sent to the MML. This may not be a

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significant performance decrease but should be monitored before permanently

reducing the filesperset of your backups.
Another consideration is time taken for resuming a backup that has failed. RMAN
resumes the backup at the backup set level, so a large backup set, that was
interrupted, will take more time to re-create than a smaller one (i.e. one with a
smaller multiplexing value)
Buffer Sizes

When RMAN takes a backup, it must read each block into an input buffer. The
block is checked to make sure it needs to be backed up and then various block
validation checks are made in order to detect corruptions. The block is then copied
into an output buffer. Write buffers are used to store the multiplexed data blocks or
archived log blocks, which are then written to the backup media (disk or tape). This
is shown clearly in Figure 3 below:

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Datafiles
input Buffers
(4 per datafile)

Output Buffers
(4 per channel)

Backup Device

Figure 3: Use of memory buffers during a backup

Backup Reading Buffers

Oracle has documented the size and number of disk reading buffers used during a
backup in the Backup and Recovery Advanced Users Guide:

Number of files per

Allocated channel
Files < 4
4 Files 8
Files > 8

Buffer size
Each buffer = 1Mb, total buffer size for channel
is up to 16Mb
Each buffer = 512k, total buffer size for channel
is up to 16Mb. Numbers of buffers per file will
depend on number of files.
Each buffer = 128k, 4 buffers per file, so each
file will have 512Kb buffer

Table 4: Read buffer allocation algorithm

The parameter that adjusts the number and size of read buffers allocated during the
backup is the channel parameter MAXOPENFILES. This specifies the maximum
number of data files that RMAN will concurrently open for input into the backup.
The default value is min(8, #files in backup set).

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To show how the algorithm equates to the actual buffer allocation during a backup,
the table below shows the buffers being split up amongst data files and backup sets
when backing up a database using different numbers for MAXOPENFILES:

MAXOPENFILES

Block
size
(bytes)

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

8192
8192
8192
8192
8192
8192
8192
8192
8192
8192

Buffer
Size
(Kb)

#Buffers
per file

#files
open at
one
time

1024
1024
1024
512
512
512
512
512
128
128

16
8
5
8
6
5
4
4
4
4

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

Total
Buffer
Size
(MB)
16
16
15
16
15
15
14
16
4.5
5

Table 5: Disk Read Buffer Allocations for Data file Backups

The number and the size of the buffers allocated for each file (data file and
archived logs) can be seen using the following query:
SELECT set_count, device_type, type, filename, buffer_size,
buffer_count, open_time, close_time
FROM v$backup_async_io
ORDER BY set_count,type, open_time, close_time;

The algorithm that Oracle uses to allocate the read buffers seems to be adequate,
but it is worth monitoring v$backup_async_io to show how much memory is
being allocated to your backup read buffers to make sure you dont run into
memory starvation issues. When running the tests shown in Table 5, there was no
change to the amount of time taken to create the backup.
Backup Writing Buffers

The backup writing buffers are sized differently for tape and disk devices:

Device Type
DISK
SBT

Number of
Buffers Per
Channel

Buffer Size
4
4

Total of Buffers
Allocated

1Mb
256Kb

4Mb
1Mb

Table 6: Default write buffer allocation

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Another potential way to increase performance is to use larger write buffers.

To demonstrate this, we ran 3 backups of a database with different write buffer
sizes. The first backup was taken using standard buffer settings (1Mb buffer). The
next two backups were taken using a small and larger write buffer size, which was
altered using the command:
Smaller buffer ( 32k * 4 = 128Kb buffer):
configure channel device type sbt parms=BLKSIZE=32768';

Larger buffer ( 512k * 4 = 2Mb buffer):

configure channel device type sbt parms='BLKSIZE=524288;

The following table showed the results of the backups from the backup
performance views:

Total Buffer Size

(bytes)
131,072
1,048,576 (default)
2,097,152

I/O Count
60564
7571
3786

I/O Time (100ths

sec)
6174
5959
5053

Table 7: I/O Rates with varying write buffer sizes

Where is the memory allocated from?

The memory for the read and write buffers is allocated from the PGA unless I/O
slaves are being used. Each channel has a distinct set of I/O buffers. If I/O slaves
are used then the buffer memory is allocated from the shared pool to enable data
transfer between the primary process and the I/O slave process. If a large pool area
is allocated using the LARGE_POOL_SIZE parameter, this will be used instead of
the shared pool. It is recommended to use the large pool to reduce contention in
the shared pool.
Synchronous vs Asynchronous I/O

When using tape devices, the goal is to keep the tape streaming. Because all tape
I/O is synchronous, the channel process will wait for the write to tape to complete
before continuing and filling the read buffers. When filling the read buffers, the
tape device will wait for the next set of write buffer data. This prevents continuous
tape streaming, and is not the optimized way for taking backups.
Therefore, it is recommended to enable tape I/O slaves with the
BACKUP_TAPE_IO_SLAVES initialization parameter, which emulates
asynchronous I/O. The channel process allocates writes to the slave processes and
does not wait for them to complete before refilling the buffers.

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What is Tape Streaming?

If there is enough data being fed to the tape fast enough, the tape drive will write
continuously, always having more to write at the next position on the tape after the
current write is through. The drive motors can keep spinning continuously at full
write speeds, so the tape just 'streams' by the heads being written.
If there is not enough data to keep the tape streaming the tape drive will normally
stop when no data is received and rewind back to the place of the last block
written, and then wait for new data to arrive. Constantly moving the tape forward
and back reduces the life of the tape, and can also slow down backup times.

Use of Incremental Backups

Probably one of the best ways to reduce the time to carry out the backups is to
simply reduce the amount of data being backed up.
Here are a few guidelines:

If there is any static data contained in the database that never changes, or
changes very infrequently, such as price lookup or definition data, then
place it within its own tablespace. This tablespace can be made read-only
and then backed up. When it is time to make changes to the data, put the
tablespace back into read-write mode, make the changes, put back into
read-only mode and take another backup of it.
NOTE: When backing up tablespaces very infrequently, you must make
sure the backup is not purged from the tape library based on the date at
which it was created. If this happens you will no longer have the data
needed for recovery. If there is a limit placed on the age of backups, then
make sure that a fresh backup of the read-only data is taken before the
expiration. RMAN can do this automatically when using the Backup
Optimization feature.

If your backup strategy includes differential incremental backups, you can

query the database to find out how many blocks usually change between
backups. By using the query listed below, it is possible to identify data files
that are not changing much, and would be candidates to being backed up
less frequently.
SELECT set_count, set_stamp, file#, data file_blocks,
blocks BACKUP_BLOCKS
FROM v$backup_data file
ORDER BY set_count, file#;

Full backups of large data files that contain very little data, versus those
with a large amount of data, can still be time-consuming, since each data
block is read into the memory buffer and evaluated to see if it has ever
been used or never used.

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To demonstrate this, the following results compare taking a full backup of

a 500Mb file with different free space counts:

%Free
space
100%
50%
<0.79 %

Number of Number of
Blocks
Blocks
Scanned
Backed Up
64000
8
64000
31678
64000
63496

Time Taken
(secs)
22
31
49

Table 8: Backup time and data file freespace

On the small test system that was used backing up to disk, the amount of
time was only 49 seconds in the worst case, but you can see that even
when the file was empty, it took 45% of the worst case to backup only 8
blocks. Imagine this on a busier system, with larger data files and many
more of them.
If you have large data files (2Gb or greater) which contain large free space
amounts, it is worth while resizing them (if there are no object extents at
the end of the file) and then setting them to autoextend to prevent wasted
time in scanning empty space during the backup.

Consider using Block Change Tracking introduced in Oracle Database

10g. This allows backups using the Optimized Incremental feature. Instead
of scanning an entire data file during a backup, with block change tracking
enabled, the change tracking file keeps track of the locations of changed
data blocks using bitmap patterns to represent ranges of data blocks.
There is very little performance overhead when tracking changed blocks.
The improvement in backup speed using the optimized incrementals with the
block change tracking enabled was dramatic. To test this, the database was
first backed up using a level 0 incremental, which backs up the entire
database. DML activity was generated in the database and then a level 1
incremental was taken. The exercise was repeated with block change
tracking disabled and then enabled. The table below shows the results:

Optimized
Incrementals?
No
Yes

#Blocks in
Database
404160
404160

#Blocks
Read
404160
72832

#Blocks in
Backup
36567
37215

Time
Taken
(secs)
156
35

Table 9: Speed increase using Optimized Incremental backups

It is clear to see the increase in speed due to the reduced number of blocks
being read when using the optimized incremental backups.

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To check if a backup used the optimized incremental feature, look at the

USED_CHANGE_TRACKING column in v$backup_data file.
The speed of restore is not affected by using optimized incremental
backups, because the resulting backup set remains the same as if it were
backed up using normal incremental backups, just created quicker.
Use of Block Checking

RMAN offers the ability to run several different block sanity checks to detect any
corruptions at time of backup and restore.
Checksums

By default, RMAN calculates checksums for every block written as part of the
backup, irrespective of the db_block_checksum parameter setting. If the
block already contains a checksum value, RMAN will verify that it is correct. The
checksum creation can be turned off by specifying the NOCHECKSUM clause as
part of the backup command. However, this is not recommended. Checksums are
always created for the SYSTEM data files and the control file.
Logical Block Checks

RMAN also offers a feature to check the logical structures contained within each
data block being backed up. The checks are the same logical block checks as those
used when the db_block_checking initialization parameter is used. To turn
on logical checking during the backup, use the CHECK LOGICAL option with the
BACKUP command. By default, logical checking is not used.
To demonstrate what effects on backup performance each check has, I ran a full
database backup with each option enabled. The results are shown below:

Checksums?
No
Yes
Yes

Check
Logical?
No
No
Yes

Blocks
read
825920
825920
825920

Time
(secs)
623.67
622.33
624.67

CPU
(secs)
227.08
229.93
245.81

Table 10: Effect of checksum and logical block checks on backups

Table 10 shows that checksum validation has little effect on backup performance.
Each data block already contains a checksum due to the default of init.ora value of
DB_BLOCK_CHECKSUMS being set to TRUE so when RMAN reads each block,
it validates that the block's checksum is correct. It is not recommended to turn off
the checksums due to the value added by this RMAN feature in block corruption
detection during backups.

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Adding the CHECK LOGICAL parameter to the RMAN backup has a small but
noticable impact on backup performance. This should be tested and benchmarked
in your own environment to see what the performance effects are.
The effects of checksums and logical block checks are similar during RMAN
restores:

Checksums?
No
Yes
Yes

Check
Logical?
No
No
Yes

#Blocks in
DB
825920
825920
825920

Time
(secs)
559
559
610

CPU
(secs)
210.53
211.14
218.53

Table 11: Effect of checksum and logical block checks on restores

Use of Compression

Before Oracle Database 10g the only type of compression that RMAN would use
was that of unused block compression unused blocks were not backed up. In
Oracle Database 10g a binary compression feature was introduced that will
compress backup set sizes by 50+%. Due to the increased amount of work
involved in the compression, backup and restore times will increase. CPU usage will
also increase.
If the MML also offers tape compression, testing should be carried out to see if it
offers a better compression ratio and backup time than using RMAN compression.
You should never use compression with RMAN and the MML due to decreased
performance during backup and restore. It would be wise to test the time and CPU
used for both RMAN and MML to see which offers the best value.
If you dont have any concerns about the amount of space a backup set occupies,
then dont use compression.
Restoring a compressed backup set has similar performance effects on the CPU
usage and overall time:

Compression

No
Yes

#Blocks
Backup Set
Read in
Size (Mb)
Backup Set
778109
6079
778109
517

Time
(secs)
559
1133

CPU
(secs)
209.37
1093.37

Table 13: Effect of RMAN compression on restore speed

Similar to the backup compression tests, the time it takes to restore the backup is
double, with a higher amount of time spent on the CPU.

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The use of RMAN compression would be advantageous if the tape devices are
mounted across the network. If this is the case, RMAN must transfer the backup
pieces from the database server to the tape server. The use of compression will
significantly reduce the amount of data traveling across the network, possibly
reducing the backup and restore times as well as causing less inconvenience to
other network users.
FACTORS AFFECTING MEDIA RECOVERY PERFORMANCE

There are a number of factors that will affect the performance of recovery,
including:

Number of Archived Logs and/or Incrementals Applied

Number of Data Files Needing Recovery

Archived Log Location

Parallel Recovery

General Database Performance

This section is making the assumption that at this stage of recovery, the data files
have been restored from RMAN using a base level backup (level 0 or a full
backup).
The Number of Archived Logs and/or Incrementals Applied

After the base level backup has been restored by RMAN, the recovery phase
begins. RMAN will first look for any suitable incremental backups that can be used
to roll the database forward. If no suitable incrementals backups are found, the
required archived logs are retrieved (assuming you are running in ARCHIVELOG
mode). It has long been documented that recovering the database using incremental
backups is faster than using archive redo log files. This can easily be tested, by
taking a base level 0 backup of the database in ARCHIVELOG mode. For a period
of time run DML against the database so that it creates between 10 and 20 archived
logs, and then take an incremental backup. Delete the database and restore the base
level 0 backup. Then use RMAN to recover the database, which will restore the
incremental backup, and time it. Restore the base level 0 again, but instead of using
RMAN to recover the database, use SQL*Plus with a RECOVER AUTOMATIC
DATABASE command, and compare the time it takes with the incremental
restore. I ran this test, and found the incremental restore to take 46 seconds
compared to the recovery through applying archived logs taking 789 seconds.
On the test system the backups were created on disk, so the speed of restoring
incremental backups was predictably much faster. If the incremental backups were
coming from a tape device or tape silo that had to locate the tape, mount the tape
and then find the start of the backup, it may have taken much longer. The point is,
on each system the speed at which archived logs and restores from the backup
media are going to vary significantly, so it is worth some investment in some time

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to test the differences. Only then can you implement the backup strategy that will
meet the time expectations when a failure occurs.
As documented in an earlier test, the type of incremental backups (cumulative or
differential) will also help determine if applying archived logs are slower than
restoring an incremental backup.
Number of Data Files Needing Recovery

When media recovery is carried out, each data block affected by a redo record must
be read into the buffer cache before the redo can be applied to it. If you recover
more data files than are necessary, you are causing recovery to do more work than
necessary. Only restore and recover the minimum amount of data files needed to
fix the failure there is no point restoring all 100 data files if only 10 need recovery.
If the failure is due to block corruptions within a data file, consider using Block
Media Recovery, introduced in Oracle9i. Instead of restoring and recovering a
whole data file, individual data blocks can be restored from a backup, and the
archived logs and/or incremental backups are used to recover them.
To show the amount of time block media recovery can save, a test that corrupted a
different number of data blocks in a 102,400 8Kb-block data file was carried out to
show the total recovery time (including the restore) between block media recovery
and data file recovery. The block corruptions were spread evenly throughout the
data file. Before corrupting the blocks, a level 0 backup was taken of the data file,
the TPCC tests were run against the database (changing 34,113 data blocks in the
data file), and all the archived logs remained on disk so they didnt need to be
restored during recovery.

Number of Corrupt
Blocks
10
99
991
5000
10000

Data file Recovery

Time (secs)
941
925
937
922
938

Block Media
Recovery Time
(secs)
145
155
219
616
1156

Table 14: Speed of block media recovery compared to data file recovery

As can be seen in Table 14, block media recovery showed a significant time saving
for recovering individual blocks over restoring and recovering the whole data file.
There will be some point at which block media recovery becomes more expensive
than recovering the whole data file, and in the test this was seen somewhere around
10,000 blocks which equates to approximately ~10% of the data file. The point of
diminishing return for block media recovery may vary for your own system.
However this test demonstrates that using block media recovery on too many

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blocks within a data file can, in fact, be slower than restoring and recovering the
whole data file.
Archived Log Location

If the archived logs needed for recovery are already on disk, recovery will complete
faster than if the archived logs need to be restored from a backup. If backup
compression (RMAN or MML) is being used, recovery times will take even longer.
On a simple test to apply 20 archived logs or restore them and apply them on a test
system, it took over 2 minutes extra to restore them, and this was using a disk
backup. This time would be greatly increased if the backups are on tape and you
need to apply a hundred or more archived logs.
It is a good idea to keep a number of archived logs available on disk to aid in
recovery speed, should they be needed. The number of log files to keep depends on
the frequency of backups and available disk space to store them.
Parallel Recovery

By default Oracle uses a single process, which is the one issuing the recovery
command, to carry out media recovery unless using
PARALLEL_AUTOMATIC_TUNING init.ora parameter. This single process will
read the archived logs and determine which changes are required for the specific
data files being recovered. The data block is read into the buffer cache, and the
redo is applied to it. Each time an archived log is completely applied, a media
recovery checkpoint occurs which signals DBWR to write all the dirty blocks in the
buffer cache to the data files. The file headers and control file also get updated with
checkpoint information. This is a lot to do for a single process, especially when
applying a large amount of redo to recover a large number of data files.
To decrease the time it takes to carry out media recovery, Oracle provides the
Parallel Recovery feature. On multiple CPU machines, you can specify a degree of
parallelism for use with the RECOVER command. The process that issues the
recovery command reads the archived logs as before, but instead of reading the
blocks in the cache and applying the redo to them directly, it passes that work to
the parallel execution slave processes. To make sure the redo is applied to the data
files in SCN order, the parallel slaves work on different ranges of data blocks, so
they will not interfere with each other, and also the redo will still get applied in
SCN order for each data block.
When recovering a small number of data files using parallel recovery it may take
longer to perform due to the extra computation involved in partitioning the work,
plus the extra IPC communication between the slave and coordinator processes.
Monitor v$session_wait and v$system_events for the top wait events.
If you are seeing PX Deq events, for which there are several different types,
then reducing the degree of parallelism may increase the recovery time.

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You will also notice an increase in CPU usage when using parallel recovery due to
the fact that the coordinator process is calculating the work partitioning for each
redo change in the archived log, and there are more processes carrying out the
recovery. As long as the CPU is not being saturated (look at something equivalent
to sar u), then parallel recovery is not causing CPU issues.
The final thing to note about parallel recovery is the way it uses memory. If the
init.ora parameter PARALLEL_AUTOMATIC_TUNING is set to FALSE (its
default value) the buffers used for messaging between the parallel processes is 2148
bytes and is allocated from the shared pool. If the
PARALLEL_AUTOMATIC_TUNING is set to TRUE, the default buffer is 4096
bytes and allocated from the large pool. By adjusting the size of the buffers, with
PARALLEL_EXECUTION_MESSAGE_SIZE init.ora parameter, the speed of
parallel recovery may be decreased, but the use of memory in the shared or large
pool should also be monitored to prevent resource starvation. For more
information on media recovery, take a look at the MAA white paper on best
practices for recovery.
General Database Performance

If the database performs slowly in day-to-day activities you shouldnt expect a fast
recovery time. Recovery uses the underlying database server processes to carry out
its tasks, so if there general performance issues already exist, recovery may have
similar issues.
Common areas that should be optimized that can help recovery times include:

I/O Recovery is very read and write intensive due to having to read all
the archived log contents, read the data blocks from the data files, and
then write the dirty blocks backup to disk once the redo has been applied.
By monitoring v$filestat along with OS-specific tools, you need to
make sure the read and write times are acceptable for the hardware being
used. Slow I/O can significantly slow down the time it takes to carry out
media recovery.

DBWR performance DBWRs main responsibility is to ensure there are

enough clean buffers in the buffer cache to be used when data is being
read from the data files. When a block has been updated, it is DBWRs job
to write the buffer to disk and return it for reuse within the buffer cache.
If DBWR cannot keep up with cleaning the buffers, you will notice waits
for the free buffer waits event. If the I/O is not a problem, then using
multiple DBWR process (or DBWR slaves if your OS does not support
asynchronous I/O or asynchronous I/O is disabled) should reduce the
waits.

CPU Utilization Because each data block that requires recovery is read
into the buffer cache before the redo change is applied to it, there are a
number of latches that must be acquired first. This includes the cache buffers

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chains and the cache buffers lru chain. Acquiring latches and making the
changes to the blocks all takes CPU cycles, so you should make sure there
is enough CPU bandwidth for the database during media recovery. It is
not uncommon to see a server with a slow trickle of transactions with lots
of CPU to spare, turn into a CPU hog during media recovery due to
having to apply a much more concentrated amount of data block changes.
If you are using parallel recovery, CPU usage will be even higher as already
discussed.
CONCLUSION

This paper has demonstrated a number of areas to consider to optimize the speed
of backups, restores, and recoveries.
The speed of backup and restore activities can be controlled by:

Using incremental backups, and cumulative incremental backups if restore

speed is more important than backup speed

Allocating one channel to each available tape device

Increasing the size of the memory buffers used when creating backups to
tape

Reducing the amount of data that needs to be backed up scanning empty

or static data files can waste significant time and resources

Using the Block Change Tracking feature to substantially increase

performance of incremental backups

The type of block checking features enabled for backup and restore

The type of compression being used by RMAN or the Media Management

Layer

The speed of media recovery can be controlled by:

The number of archived logs that need applying with the greater the
number, the slower recovery will take

The number of incremental backups that need to be restored and applied

The type of incremental backup being used (differential or cumulative)

The number of data files needing recovery. A higher number data files that
are restored and recovered, means a higher number of data blocks need to
be read into the buffer cache and written back to the data files

Using block media recovery instead of restoring and recovering whole data
files due to corruption issues

Using parallel recovery, which partitions the work of applying redo

between parallel execution slave process to decrease the time it takes to
apply the redo

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General database performance tuning. If the database performs slowly, so

will the recoveries, so the database should be optimized before beginning
recovery optimization.

The tests carried out in this paper demonstrate the key points to optimization, and
it should be understood that each system will offer different performance gains by
making any of the suggested adjustments. The speed of backup, restore and
recovery is heavily dependent on the speed of the hardware being used by the
system, plus any network latency introduced when the backups are stored on
remote tape servers.
Backup, restore, and recovery should be thoroughly tested, not just to ensure it will
protect you against failures, but also to make sure that backups occur in the allotted
time window and that restore and recovery can conform to your Service Level
Agreement.

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RMAN Backup and Recovery Optimization

March 2005
Author: Stephan Haisley
Contributing Authors: RMAN Development
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