Ways of Reducing Patching Downtime

Ways of Reducing Patching Downtime

1.Use a staged applications system

This major time-saver hinges on a key principle:  all of your applications filesystem patches are applied to a clone of your production Apps environment.  This can be done while your production system is still running.  Your production system is down only for the time needed to apply database patches.

2.Use a shared application-tier file system

If you have a pool of application-tier servers set up for load-balancing, make sure that all of the individual servers share a single application filesystem.  Patches applied to this central shared filesystem are instantly available to all application-tier servers.

3.Distribute worker processes across multiple servers

When applying a patch that includes a large number of processes, you can reduce the downtime even further by distributing the worker processes across multiple servers on multiple nodes. Using the Distributed AD feature of AutoPatch and AD Controller, you can assign workers to run on the primary node and on other nodes that share the filesystem.

4.Merge multiple patches using AD Merge Patch

Merging patches saves time because the AutoPatch overhead of starting a new session is eliminated for those patches that are consolidated.  Duplicate linking, generating or database actions are run once only.  If two patches update the same file, AD Merge Patch will save time by applying only the latest one.  Patches can -- and should -- be merged with their listed prerequisite patches.

5.Run AD Patch in non-interactive mode

Applying a set of patches using AD Patch in non-interactive mode eliminates the delay between successive tasks.

6.Defer system-wide database tasks until the end

Using adpatch options=nocompiledb,nomaintainmrc defers system-wide database tasks such as "Compile APPS schema" and "Maintain MRC" until after all patches have been applied.  As of AD.H, AutoPatch automatically compiles the APPS schema and maintains MRC when applying standard patches.

7.Avoid resource-related bottlenecks

Patching can grind to a halt if you bump into the ceiling on your system.  Before patching, make sure that you've enabled automatic tablespace management, and that you have sufficient hardware and free disk and temp space.