Oracle memory usage on Windows

	Windows server 2008 r2 standard - sp1
	Oracle Enterprise Edition 11.2.0.3 64 bit

I inherited this environment (about a dozen small Oracle instances running on four servers) four weeks ago so I am still in the process of getting my bearings. Virtually all of my work with Oracle databases in the past has been on UNIX servers.

On one of my servers I have two oracle.exe processes, one for each of the Oracle instances on the server. Each shows a size of about 6.3 gb in task manager. Looking at databases on my other servers with similar sized sga parameters the size of oracle.exe processes is 1 gb or smaller. On the server with the large processes we bounce the two instances every night. My predecessor told me that this was the only way that they find that they could kill all of the dead connections. The memory sizes of the two processes have not grown since this morning so that combined with the daily restarts would seem to eliminate the possibility of a memory leak. The two databases are in the 3-4 gb size range.

The sysadmin on the server says that this just started happening after the last Microsoft patch although I have not been able to verify this as yet. There are other applications running on the server and memory seems to be an issue.

So my questions:

Is 6.3 gb an unusually large for the size of an oracle.exe process on Windows? What factors, aside from sga_max_size would be contributing to the size of the processes?

Thanks,
Peter Schauss

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