ipcs problems - possibly - in oracle 8?

Hi

Can anyone give me a clue here?

I've a couple of test databases recently upgraded to Oracle 8.1.6r2 on Solaris 2.7.

The test users are complaining that sometimes they can get in, sometimes they can't (we've checked the usual suspects like listener, alert log etc, but no dice). As nothing was changing in between (neither client nor database), my suspicions fell on unix itself.

About the only thing that looks out of the ordinary is shared memory ISM attaches which worryingly looks like this:

(ipcs -i)

T ID KEY MODE OWNER GROUP ISMATTCH NATTCH Shared Memory:

m          0   0x500e0dd9 --rw-r--r--     root     root        1
m          1   0x790      --rw-rw-rw-     root     root        0
m          2   0x9ae7520  --rw-r-----   oracle      dba       10    11 -
RBTEST
m          3   0xbf67de8  --rw-r-----   oracle      dba       25    25 -
HOULIVE
m          4   0x98a5f10  --rw-r-----   oracle      dba       37    36 -
RBLIVE
m          5   0xb4e6bf8  --rw-r-----   oracle      dba        8     8 -
HOUTEST
m          6   0x1503facc --rw-r-----   oracle      dba 4,294,966,760  10 -
RBDEV
m          7   0xb45ab788 --rw-r-----   oracle      dba 4,294,964,292   7 -
HOUDEV
m          8   0x280267   --rw-r--r--     root     root        0

(sorry, here's hoping you use Courier font... :-)

As you'll see, the ism attch column is mental. Also, it's going down. I appreciate that this may be more of a solaris problem, so I've posted there as well. The man pages don't give too much detail on why this might occur
(though the large number leads me to believe an overflow of an unsigned
integer or similar has occured).

Any ideas if this is something for concern and if anyone can point me towards something useful on ISMATTCH (I've tried Sun search, general web/usenet search etc), that would be top (no unix-pun intended). I'm certainly giving it a good go here, but our top unix man is off on compassionate leave and there's danger of a crowd forming around my desk...

Andrew Received on Tue Jan 16 2001 - 12:06:24 CST