User process starting before the last DB restarting and using a lot of memory

This day we met the following problem:

1. Oracle 8.1.7.3 Enterprise Edition (SGA 18 Gb) Sun Fire 4800 Solaris 8 32 Gb RAM
2. At some moment we saw there wasn't enough memory in the server (TOP shown less than 50 Mb).
3. We found the process for which SIZE and RES fields of TOP output are equal 18 Gb.
4. It was a user process: ps -ef | grep shown the output like this one: oraclework (LOCAL=NO)
5. But we didn't see any information about this process (SPID field) in V$PROCESS view. Aand the starting time for this process (output of PS command) was earlier than the time of last DB restarting.
6. We killed this process (kill -9)
7. After it we had a lot free memory in the system. But it became impossible to connect DB (sqlplus internal, svrmgrl internal) because of the sessions hanging.
8. There isn't any information about it in the alert.log or trace files.
9. After restarting the server we resolved this problem.

Any comments, please.
- about this problem and its solution;

• or any further ways to investigate it if it happens again.

Thanks in advance. Received on Thu May 25 2006 - 04:51:07 CDT