utl_file.FCLOSE() is slow with large files

Question

We are using utl_file in Oracle 10g to copy a blob from a table row to a file on the file system and when we call utl_file.fclose() it takes a long time. It's a 10mb file, not very big, and it takes just over a minute to complete. Anyone know why this would be so slow?

Thanks

EDIT Looks like this is related to our file system. When we write to a local drive it works fine.

Answer 1

Are you doing a fflush prior to that? If not, then the fclose is performing the fflush for you and that may be where the time is. Check it by issuing a fflush prior to close.

Answer 2

We have determined that it is our network file system mount causing the issue. When we remove that from the problem and store the file to a local drive it works fine. We were able to test this on another environment with the same configuration and it's fast and works as expected.

Now we need to get our network guys involved and see why transfering data on the NFS is so slow in this environment.

EDIT It was the network speed between the oracle server and the UNIX server. It was set to half duplex 10Mb per second. So we bumped it up to full duplex 100Mb and it works great now!