How much of a resource hog is Oracle Enterprise Manager?

Question

I'm using a medical records system built on an Oracle database. Our vendor just told us that we need to shut down Oracle's Enterprise Manager service when we're not using it, because it uses too much of the system's resources. I know I can get actual numbers by checking Sysinternals Process Explorer, but I was hoping that someone can give me info from their personal experience.

Do I need to shut down EM when I'm done with it, or is he being overly concerned?

Answer 1

We do the same thing on our testing and production servers too. I don't have any metrics to hand, but it did make a noticeable improvement in overall database response

Answer 2

EM should not be that intrusive. I find that it takes about 10% cpu for less then 2 seconds every 30 seconds with the default install (YMMV) and when the system is under load, it doesn't even seem to do that.

When I talk about EM here, I am NOT talking about the load on the oracle.exe process, but instead from the nmesrvc and the perl, cmd and emagent processes it spawns. To see its impact on the database itself requires a bit of an oracle expert.

I find process explorer a nice tool to help review this real time because it shows the process hierarchy from the service parent nmesrvc.

Frankly, if you're actually seeing an end user difference when stopping the dbconsole service, then your box is over capacity and you likely need to grow up or out.

If you use a different tool to manage and monitor oracle and other application processes, there's not much need for the dbconsole process to run all the time.

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