Having recently done several of these, I can say that "audit db" is, to a large extent, CPU bound. We copied a DB snapshot to a faster box (1281 MHz UltraSPARC IIIi) to run the audit, which ran for 30 hours. On the prod box (400 MHz US-II) it would've taken probably at least 3x as long. DB is 21 GB assigned, about 90% utilised.
Since it appears pretty much to be a single thread doing random I/O, disk back-end doesn't matter too much, unless maybe if you have enough cache to hold most of the DB... Even still, the I/O time is not a huge part of the total run time. Also, being a single thread, more CPUs doesn't help much, if at all. One big, fast CPU is what's needed.
Cheers, -- stix
