Re: 8.1.7 instance on Solaris periodically goes sluggish, then hangs...

There are several bugs in 8.1.7 with this annoying behaviour. You did not say what patch release you are on. If anything before 8.1.7.4, good chance its one of those.

Bottom line is TOAD or Spotlight is useful for normal circumstances, but not in this case where everything thing seems to hang. The only thing that will get in is svrmgrl /sysdba - to do a systemstate dump. Search Metalink for 'systemstate'.

If you see wait-events for 'cache-buffer-chains', this is likely to be the problem I was referring to. Shutdown abort cleans it up because the problem is/was in buffers/latches, ie memory.

• Original Message ----- To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L <ORACLE-L_at_fatcity.com> Sent: Tuesday, July 29, 2003 1:39 AM

> Hi,
>
> rather vague, this one, I'm afraid, but we're stumped for ideas.
>
> We have an Oracle 8.1.7 instance on a Sun Solaris setup, which we're
currently testing prior to going live. Every so often - 2 or 3 times a week - the users phone to say the application has stopped responding. They're waiting several minutes with no response. We find we can usually fire up one or two tuning apps, such as TOAD or Quest's Spotlight, but within a few minutes, these also stop responding. By this time, even trying to fire up a SQL*Plus session from my PC just hangs and hangs, without the login ever completing. We always end up having to get the sysadmin to abort-shutdown Oracle and then restart it. After which everything's fine - until the next time.
>
> I've checked the PROCESSES parameter, and this is set to 150 - way above
the maximum number of connections we've seen (around 40 or so). Likewise SESSIONS and TRANSACTIONS parameters seem generously adequate. The sysadmin says the server itself doesn't seem to be having any problems. He can log in and run UNIX commands with no apparent performance problems.
>
> Any ideas at all would be very welcome!
>
> Paul Vincent
> Oracle DBA
> University of Central England
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> Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net
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> Author: Paul Vincent
> INET: Paul.Vincent_at_uce.ac.uk
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Author: Binley Lim
  INET: Binley.Lim_at_xtra.co.nz

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