This was a very precise and correct answer, but unfortunately rather hard to Implement in practice. Process preemption or context switching, as it is sometimes called, happens while CPU is in kernel mode. Kernel mode is normally spent only on 2 major things: 1) context switching 2) paging CPU being in kernel mode means that OS it taking care of its own health and Happiness and not working on the user request. Commands like ps -lp <PID> or top will give you precise amount of kernel mode spent by your process. If that amount is significant, it warrants further investigation by using truss or strace. BTW, whenever a system service is requested, a context change happens. It includes things like read, write, stat and alike. The mechanism for calling system services is based on "switch mode to kernel" trap. System service number is the 1st argument for the trap handler. -- Mladen Gogala Ext. 121 -----Original Message----- From: Cary Millsap [mailto:cary.millsap@xxxxxxxxxx] Sent: Tuesday, November 30, 2004 9:59 AM To: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: RE: cpu average load The amount of response time that process preemptions are costing your performance is measured as the amount of response time in an extended SQL trace file that is not accounted for by the sum of your file's c values at recursive depth zero, plus the sum of your file's ela values. -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l