I know that by posting this I'm risking public mockery but I believe that one of the common rules about chosing the DB block size is sort of an oracle myth.

In particolar it is common practice to choose a DB block size identical to the filesystem block size when not using direct i/o.

This paper collects some discussions I had on newsgroup and mailing list on oracle and the so called "port redirection".
It is intended to help ending the oracle myth regarding the use of oracle (on unix) and firewalls.

The tests have been performed on Linux, AIX, Solaris.
At the moment I haven't got any other unix-like operating system where to expand these test.

First of all the myth: