8.1.6 goes mad until HD full

Folks,

I am running 8.1.6 on Linux RedHat 6.2 with all current patches applied. The server is backing a web site with moderate traffic.

At normal times, it writes about one archived redo log per quarter hour (500k per piece).

Sometimes it starts writing more and more archived redo, up until 50-100 archived logs per minute (!!). This fills up the partition rather quick (<12 hours) and results in Oracle panicking and exiting. Cleaning up archived redo in the meantime delays the crash, but eventually oracle is writing archived redo more quickly that you could delete it.

I tried executing queries like

select username,first_load_time, to_char(logon_time, 'HH24:MI:SS DD.MM.YYYY'), sql_text from v$sqlarea, v$session where address = sql_address

while the database was "going mad" to identify queries or processes that could cause all that - without being successful.

On average, every 1-2 weeks oracle crashes due to this problem. Solution is to clean up the archived log directory, startup, shutdowm immediate (or it will continue to write archived redo at high speed) and startup again. Sometimes it is also necessary to restart the web server software whichs runs on a different machine, but is the only source of oracle users.

I can more or less exclude external people connecting to the server as it is behind a firewall that restricts traffic to ssh and http.

I hope there is someone out there who has experienced [and solved ;-)] a similar problem....

best regards and good night,
many thanks in advance

    -hannes Received on Thu Oct 25 2001 - 17:56:33 CDT