Free memory in server and session PGA memory

From: Sreejith S Nair <sreejith.sreekantan_at_ibsplc.com>
Date: Mon, 14 Nov 2011 07:41:48 +0530
Message-Id: <8C88024F-EB23-48AB-8B5C-1A1BDADBDD20_at_ibsplc.com>



Hi Friends,

Environment : Solaris 10 , oracle 11.2.0.2

We have our production databases monitored by the BMC portal application. We often get alerts and warnings on free memory on the server. Say my server has 24 GB physical memory, we will get an alert when it comes down 2.4GB which is 10%.

We troubleshoot this starting with vmstat command and we can see the 'free' part in vmstat do report a value less than 3 GB. This server is part of a two node rac which hosts two databases. If I do a ps command sort on pmem I can see that the processes consuming most memory ( which has pmem field , which is a ratio as 4 - 5 ) are oracle server processes ( oracle<ORACLE_SID>(LOCAL=NO)). Now IF I check what these processes are doing I can see that these are coming from jdbc thin client ( yes, we use weblogic). Most of these sessions coming top in ps command are now INACTIVE. So my understanding is that these are app server connections which were once took for doing something and later released to connection pool. The question here are

  1. Why memory taken by these processes ( of course from PGA ) are not released to OS after use.
  2. I understand this is default weblogic behavior of keeping connections in pool and use them when they need. But considering memory associated with these are still not released to OS , is this an efficient way ?
  3. If I check the wait event of these INACTIVE sessions they have ' SQL Net wait '. Again , is this a good behavior from weblogic ?
  4. I have also run Tanel's procmm and noticed the Anon memory almost equals to 'PGA used by this session' from v$sesstat which again confirms that 'unused memory' ( once used) is still associated with the process.

I would like to get help from experts who might have already thought about this and will have answer to my questions, which in a way may not e relevant.

PS : I already have an SR open for which I did not get a proper response.

Best Regards,
Sreejith
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