Tales From A Lazy Fat DBA

ASMCMD is a command-line utility that you can use to easily view and manipulate files and directories within Automatic Storage Management (ASM) disk groups. It can list the contents of disk groups, perform searches, create and remove directories and aliases, display space utilization, and more.

But some of the times i have noticed some errors or slowness in command executions with ASMCMD and i believe you guys have too faced the same in the past. And the problem with ASMCMD errors are that they are not much detailed and are obscure which makes the troubleshooting more complicated and direction less.

There are few of the methods or the ways that i follow to handle performance issues with the asmcmd command line are given below.

1. Use ORADEBUG
What happens when you connect with ASMCMD ?
It actually connects with the ASM instance with SYSASM privilege and the same moment a background local process spawns with name BEQ.
Now once you recognize the process using ps -ef commands you can bind it to the ORADEBUG with errostack flag.

2. Truss or STRACE of ASMCMD and its processes.

example:

$ strace -aeft -o /dixit/labtest/asmcmdtrbsst.log asmcmd
ASMCMD>

3. Set the DBI_TRACE for ASMCMD perl tracing
Asmcmd is a wrapper for asmcmdcore script which is a shell script that starts a Perl program. If you are a Perl programmer, you can easily extend this script to add additional commands and security checks. We can use the DBI_TRACE argument to collect more diagnostic information on asm command line.

$ export DBI_TRACE=1
ASMCMD>

Hope That Helps
Prashant Dixit