Oracle crashed with ORA-004700

Oracle 8.1.6.2.0 on Sun SPARC Solaris 2.7 Production instance crashed for no obvious reason.

alert.log contains two lines

PMON: terminating instance due to error 470 Instance terminated by PMON, pid = 299

No trace/core files have been generated.

Quick health check of Solaris found nothing unusual: all filesystems OK, number of processes OK (about 200 <defunct> with YP as a parent), memory/swap OK.

Metalink has couple of notes that indicate as possible reasons: 1) Max number of simultaneously open files (UNIX limit) exceeded. In particular, they mention MAXFILES kernel parameter for HP-UX. I couldn't find anything similar for Solaris. 2) Too frequent log switches - this system has a log switch approx. every two hours.
3) Too many log switched - this system was created recently and log sequence is at 1124.
So none of these applies to our system.

This is the first time it happened on production system, although we had similar crash on development box.

Anyone has seen something similar?

Thanks,
Sev Received on Fri Jul 20 2001 - 00:39:21 CDT