4031 errors

solaris 8
oracle 9204
2gb of physical memory
144mb shared pool
32mb buffer
16mb large pool
144 mb java pool
24 mb pga target

I'm having problems with a load that is consistently generating ORA-4031 errors. The procedure that is generating the error contains a straight forward merge statement.

My initial thought was to look at the kernel settings. Sure enough shmmax was way under the recommendation. the sysadmin set it to 1536000000 from 1024000000. The recommeded setting that i found was 4294967295. For now that's all he is willing to do.

I don't have direct access to the server but I do have dba privileges in the database. I'm not real sure how to proceed. I tried flushing the shared pool (on a whim) and that didn't help.

there doesn't appear to ever be more than 7 or 8 users on the database. ....though i'm not sure what else is on the server.

without the ability to login to the machine myself, i have a pretty strong urge to say there's not much i can do about it but i want to make sure that's actually true.

the sa seems to be a nice guy. if i gave him some solaris commands to run, i'm sure he'd do it for me....the problem is that i'm not familiar with solaris.

does anyone have any suggestions on how to go about troubleshooting this farther?

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