Re: Solaris 10/Oracle 9 memory problems - but I can't see why ...

From: joel garry <joel-garry_at_home.com>
Date: Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:17:40 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <d85c0af7-1139-48d2-a392-7a7eabe0029e_at_s38g2000prg.googlegroups.com>



On Apr 20, 7:26 am, Neil Cudd <neil.c..._at_blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Solaris sparc 5.10 running Oracle 9.2.0.764 bit EE.
> The server has 2Gb physical memory.
> The (offshore) unix monitors are telling me the server is running out
> of memory. They won't tell me anything else. I guess they think that'd
> take the fun out of it.
> There is one oracle instance with a total sga of 380Mb
> There isn't anything else running (other than BMC Patrol and a Java
> process).
> My unix skills are shaky, but prstat gives the following (editied for
> highlights) :
>
>    PID USERNAME  SIZE   RSS STATE  PRI NICE      TIME  CPU PROCESS/
> NLWP
>   1104 patrol     42M   36M cpu0     0   10   3:19:43 1.1% PatrolAgent/
> 1
>   3035 oracle    456M  437M sleep   59    0   0:02:39 0.0% oracle/12
>   3098 patrol    450M  444M sleep   59    0   0:11:19 0.0% oracle/1
>   3097 patrol     18M   10M sleep   59    0   0:04:27 0.0% sqlplus/1
>   3047 oracle    456M  438M sleep   59    0   0:00:02 0.0% oracle/11
>   3037 oracle    452M  434M sleep   59    0   0:02:08 0.0% oracle/12
>   3031 oracle    450M  429M sleep   59    0   0:01:44 0.0% oracle/1
>   3043 oracle    449M  433M sleep   59    0   0:00:39 0.0% oracle/1
>   3045 oracle    449M  437M sleep   59    0   0:00:37 0.0% oracle/1
>
> A couple of questions :
> Is this output saying that each of those oracle processes has 400+Mb
> memory allocated to it (can't be surely..)
> Is there anything anyone can suggest to identify just what is eating
> all the memory ?
>
> Many thanks for any advice,
> Neil

Look on metalink for docs that explain how memory works for oracle on unix (Notes 174555.1, 153961.1 are a good start, may be some irrelevant old stuff in there). A lot is shared memory (man ipcs), so you only have to count that once.

It's been too long since I've been on sun to give good advice, but you might check swapinfo, which may be superceded by the advice others have given.

Definitely check out http://blog.tanelpoder.com/

Just offhand, physical memory and sga both seem small for this day and age, depending on how many users you have.

I've noticed on my platform (hp-ux Itanium) EM seems to be spitting out just plain wrong messages about excessive swapping and memory utilization. I'm interpreting that as someone at Oracle didn't understand that hp-ux can have memory for swap and different memory utilization metrics on some OS versions. Perhaps you have something similar going on. Or perhaps I've just gone insane.

jg

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Received on Mon Apr 20 2009 - 17:17:40 CDT

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