11G Managed Recovery Process

MRP process is commonly referenced throughout the web as the process which performs redo apply to your managed standby database. MRP may can in a team with PQ slave (or prnn in 11G) processes in case you start managed recovery in parallel.

Unfortunately, the term performs redo apply seems to be causing some confusion along the way as well. I found it very common that people believes that it's MRP process which performs both reads from the redo streams as well as writes changes into datafiles. For example, sometimes they try to battle slow log apply by increasing managed recovery parallelism without realizing that there is in fact a bit more to the puzzle.

Some details

I'm going to use my 11G DataGuard setup to demonstrate a couple of key points. My setup is operating using real time apply (no parallel), which makes the entire example a bit simpler to demonstrate.

Let's update a row on the source DB:

SQL> update t set n=n;

1 row updated.

SQL>  commit;

Commit complete.

Now, take a look at MRP strace output which was produced as a result of the above change:

[oracle@ora11gr1b fd]$ ps -fp 6364
UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY          TIME CMD
oracle    6364     1  0 19:59 ?        00:00:00 ora_mrp0_ora11gr1
[oracle@ora11gr1b fd]$ strace -e pread,pwrite -p 6364
Process 6364 attached - interrupt to quit
pread(32,..., 512, 45568) = 512
pread(32,..., 1024, 46080) = 1024
pread(30,..., 8192, 2228224) = 8192
pread(30,..., 8192, 259858432) = 8192
pread(31,..., 8192, 9461760) = 8192

I've set filesystemio_options=none so we can observe pread/pwrite syscalls which are easier to follow compared to asynch io_submit/io_getvents system calls (and we don't care about O_DIRECT flag either).

Let's check what are these file descriptors:

[oracle@ora11gr1b fd]$ cd /proc/6364/fd
[oracle@ora11gr1b fd]$ file 30
30: symbolic link to `/u01/oradata/ORA11GR1B/datafile/o1_mf_undotbs1_0fk5fp2c_.dbf'
[oracle@ora11gr1b fd]$ file 31
31: symbolic link to `/u01/oradata/ORA11GR1B/datafile/o1_mf_users_0ik5fp4u_.dbf'
[oracle@ora11gr1b fd]$ file 32
32: symbolic link to `/u01/oradata/ORA11GR1B/onlinelog/o1_mf_9_4qn2rkhk_.log'

In other words, the process read from standby logfile, undo and users (this is where our table is) tablespaces. However, as you might notice, all these calls were reads, we didn't write anything.

From time to time MRP gets a bit more interesting, for example during logfile switches:

...
pwrite(27,..., 16384, 16384) = 16384
pread(27,..., 16384, 16384) = 16384
pread(28,..., 8192, 8192) = 8192
pread(29,..., 8192, 8192) = 8192
pread(30,..., 8192, 8192) = 8192
pread(31,..., 8192, 8192) = 8192
pread(27,..., 16384, 393216) = 16384
pwrite(28,..., 8192, 8192) = 8192
pwrite(29,..., 8192, 8192) = 8192
pwrite(30,..., 8192, 8192) = 8192
pwrite(31,..., 8192, 8192) = 8192
...

Here we actually wrote (27 is a controlfile, 28 and 29 are system and sysaux tablespaces respectively) something. However, from the offset (fourth parameter) you can realize that we are writing to the second block in these datafiles. There is no (can't be) any user data there.

Who is writing the data then?

The first thing you might want to check is, of course, the database writer process:

[oracle@ora11gr1b ~]$ ps -fp 6303
UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY          TIME CMD
oracle    6303     1  0 19:55 ?        00:00:00 ora_dbw0_ora11gr1
[oracle@ora11gr1b ~]$ strace -e pread,pwrite -p 6303
Process 6303 attached - interrupt to quit
pwrite(23,..., 8192, 2097152) = 8192
pwrite(23,..., 8192, 35987456) = 8192
pwrite(24,..., 8192, 9461760) = 8192

This is the output produced by standby's dbwr right after we updated our table on the source. We wrote two undo blocks (23) and one block in users tablespace (24). By looking at the offset for file descriptor 24 we can confirm that we wrote the table itself:

SQL> select segment_name
 2   from dba_extents
 3   where tablespace_name='USERS'
 4    and 9461760/8192 between block_id and block_id + blocks-1;

SEGMENT_NAME
--------------------------
T

From the above you can confirm that it is DBWR process which wrote the changes for us and it plays crucial role during your standby database operations.

MRP's workload consists mostly from reading the redo stream, datafiles, controlfiles and occasional writes into the controlfile and datafiles header.

If your standby is suffering from the redo apply performance, you may want to pay attention to both MRP and DBWR processes.