Why Sql*net process use so much RAM??

G'Day All,

I recently noticed on the Solaris box at work that the clients' SqlNet connections to the server vary between 25 and 65Mb per process. This seems high to me and was wondering if anybody else knows if this is normal or not.

I'll spell out the details of the system first:  Hardware: Sun Enterprise 3000, 4x167Mhz CPU

            memory 768Mb
            Sparc Storage Array
            clients are: Pentium133 w 32Mb Ram (approx 70 of them)
            
 Software: Solaris 2.5.1
           Oracle Server 7.3.2 with distributed option
           Oracle Forms 4.5
           SqlNet v2.0(tcp/ip)
           Clients: Microsoft WfWg.

I've been doing some tuning and noticed some paging on the server. I realize that Solaris has a high paging rate normally but spotted these large sqlnet connections to the server. Since we have changed the project a little and now store a lot of data centrally in a database and use database links to the central tables from other instances within the same server, more and more sqlnet connections appear to maintain the db links. I'm not sure why these have to consume so much RAM.

Do the connections store all data returned from a users query in memory, awaiting to send the next set of rows to the client? I was thought the SGA handled caching of returned rows.

Does anybody have any ideas on how to tune these processes? Is all this depenant on our particular application ?

This is an OLTP site and the users bring back beteen 50-500 rows max at a time from thier queries, so I am confused to where all the memory is being used by these sqlnet processes. Under SQL*Net v1.0 they were much smaller.

Has anybody seen this sort of behaviour before?

I am not an Oracle GURU, I mainly do Sys Admin, so any help would be very much appreciated,

Thanks in advance,
Darryl Cording. Received on Sat Jan 24 1998 - 00:00:00 CST