Solaris/Intel Oracle 8i Memory

I am running Oracle 8i on solaris/intel.

My qyestion: How come dedicated server processes take up so much memory? Now, I am not talking about the SGA that gets reported on each processes, I am talking about private memory used for each server connection. Ever time I connect to the database, I eat about 3 megs of RAM and about 20 megs of swap, consistently. I can have 500 megs of swap available and 120 megs of RAM available, and connect to the database. It will drop my swap by 20 megs and take 3 megs out of RAM. Note: I am not looking at ps and getting shared memory confused with actual private memory allocated per dedicated server processes.

What is causing oracle to take such a big chunk? My SGA is about 35 megs. Is there something wrong with my shared memory setup that is causing these server processes to allocate a crap load of private memory for some reason?

I have run 200 users dedicated on 256 megs of RAM on NT before without this swapping problem because each dedicated processes only took up 300k or so.

Thanks.

• Paul