INIT forks too many ORACLE instances...

From: R. K. Madhavan <rmadhava_at_rnd.STERN.NYU.EDU>
Date: 6 Apr 94 16:42:34 GMT
Message-ID: <61370_at_rnd.STERN.NYU.EDU>


Hi Folks...

I am posting this for my brother who does not have access to the net. He is working abroad and so if you need further details, I have to get on the horn over this weekend. Please email me any suggestions as I am not a regular reader of the newsgroup (Shame on me! But as my doctoral-dissertation adviser puts it copious free time awaits me as soon as I make tenure!)

Here goes...



We are facing a very peculiar problem with our Project Implementation... Of course , I am not directly involved or assigned to the problem but I am was very much interested and am following it closely...

When the Unix system is booted the "Init Process" brings up the Oracle Database i.e 4 oracle processes are fired The parent id of these are 1. After that the system is ready for use.. i.e the users logs in and starts using the application.(Oracle Financials).. Now , irrespectve of the load on the system , this peculiar thing happens.. A Unix Process with the owner as the application login, "orapps" in this case and the parent id as "1" gets created at regular intervels... and these processes never die , but chew up a whole lot of CPU time.. The process name (COMMAND) is something like "oracleAU01 P:4036,5,8" i.e it is a call to ORACLE... (AU01 is the name of the database instance) And the System gets very very slow as the no. of these processes increases... As an interim solution they either kill these or do a shutdown and bring up the system again...

The questions are:



Why are these processes forked by init (PID 1)?...

Will "init" fork even after the system has been booted and is running..?

Most importantly what can I suggest (and earn a promotion!!) to arrest this phenomenon?

I looked thru the log files to which Oracle Spools all its messages. There were several error messages saying "Semop Error, unable to increment semaphore". This error could possibily be because too many processes (because of the above problem) were fired and oracle ran out of semaphores...



Any takers? I hope so... Received on Wed Apr 06 1994 - 18:42:34 CEST

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