The CKPT process, which always exists in Oracle8 but is optional in Oracle7, is responsible for updating the headers of all Oracle datafiles at the time of a checkpoint. In Oracle7, this task may be performed by the LGWR process, but if there are many datafiles in the database then LGWR performance may be reduced. In such a case, the CKPT process can be enabled to perform this task through the use of the CHECKPOINT_PROCESS parameter in INIT.ORA (see Chapter 12). Note that the CKPT process does not actually write the updated header records to disk; that is still the responsibility of the DBWR process.