In the Cloud Performance is Instrumented as Cost - A Resource Plan for PeopleSoft

In the cloud, either you are spending too much money on too much CPU, or your system is constrained by CPU at peak times.  You can have as much performance as you are willing to pay for. 

This presentation (from the UKOUG 2024 conference) is the story of how one PeopleSoft customer improved performance and reduced cloud subscription costs, by clearly stating their performance goals, and creating a matching resource manager plan.

Effective use of machine resources has always been a challenge for PeopleSoft systems.  As systems move to the cloud that is in ever sharper focus.  In the cloud, you mostly pay for CPU.  You can generally have as much performance as you are willing to pay for, but every architectural decision you make has an immediate cost consequence. That drives out different behaviours. 

In the cloud, you rent hardware as an operational expense, rather than purchasing it as a capital expense.  If you are not short of CPU, you are probably spending too much. If you are short of CPU, then you need to the Oracle database's Resource Manager to manage what happens.

This presentation looks at how that played out at one PeopleSoft customer, who moved their GL reporting batch on Financials onto Exadata Cloud-at-Customer. The single most important thing they did was to clearly state their goals. That set the ground rules for sizing and configuring both their database and their application, implementing various database features, including defining a resource manager plan, as well as using partitioning, materialized views, compression, and in-memory. 

They have continued to improve performance and save money on their cloud costs.  They were recently able to switch off another CPU. 

The session also describes a generic resource plan that can be used as a starting point for any PeopleSoft system to which individual requirements can be added.

• PeopleSoft DBA Blog: PSFT_PLAN: A Sample Oracle Database Resource Manager Plan for PeopleSoft
• GitHub: psft_resource_plan_simple.sql

Finally, there are some ideas for prioritising Tuxedo server processes on Linux.