Oracle leaks memory under Solaris X86 ?

I have found something strange. Our system started running into memory related problems ever since we installed Oracle on it. Just the other day we completely ran out of 360MB swap space.

Our system is Pent PRO 200MHz system with 128MB memory and 4GB Quantum drive running Solaris X86 2.5.1 (latest) with all the latest patches applied. Oracle release 7.3.2.0.0

At first I thought that maybe it was some of the programs we wrote. So I turned them all off and rebooted the machine to see if I could see any difference in the behaviour. But it didn't make any difference. The only other thing was Oracle. So I shut it down and rebooted the machine and I had about 55MB of free memory. I kept the system running without Oracle for a week and everything worked fine and system had plenty of free memory and almost all of swap was available also.

I thought well, maybe it could be one of my PL/SQL procedures. So I uninstalled entire Oracle and re-installed it with all the default settings and did not run anything on it or create any tables. Sure enough it was still eating memory. So I figured that maybe it was the release we bought 7.3.2.0.0, so I went ahead and downloaded the trial version from their web site which is a newer release 7.3.2.2.0 and installed that. But the results were the same. The system starts getting low on memory very slowly. It eats up all the memory in about 4 or 5 hours, even when I or nobody else is doing anything and then it starts eating swap.

Here is a an output of top :

last pid: 8964; load averages: 0.04, 0.04, 0.05 21:53:24 71 processes: 70 sleeping, 1 on cpu
CPU states: 95.5% idle, 0.4% user, 4.2% kernel, 0.0% iowait, 0.0% swap Memory: 116M real, 2152K free, 108M swap, 286M free swap    

  PID USERNAME PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE TIME WCPU CPU COMMAND

  229 oracle7   33    0   34M   22M sleep   0:22  0.03%  0.03% dbsnmp
  233 oracle7   33    0   34M   22M sleep   0:23  0.03%  0.03% dbsnmp
  194 oracle7   34    0   13M 5240K sleep   0:00  0.00%  0.00% oracle
  196 oracle7   34    0   13M 4136K sleep   0:00  0.00%  0.00% oracle
  298 root      33    0   29M 3724K sleep   0:09  0.00%  0.00% msqld
  190 oracle7   34    0   13M 3356K sleep   0:01  0.00%  0.00% oracle
  192 oracle7   34    0   13M 2968K sleep   0:00  0.00%  0.00% oracle
  188 oracle7   34    0   13M 2724K sleep   0:00  0.00%  0.00% oracle

I sorted the output on memory usage 'res'. I am not sure what dbsnmp does. That process alone is taking 44MB of memory. Any ideas ?

Thanks a million in advance.

Atif Khan
aak2_at_ra.msstate.edu Received on Tue Jan 28 1997 - 00:00:00 CST