We've had couple of incidents on large production system where memory
utilization on Unix box running Oracle database server grew to 99% and
performance was severely effected.
Client applications received some ORA-4030 errors.
Most of the memory was consumed by Oracle client and background
processes. Memory utilization after the machine was last rebooted was
57%.
After some research we found information about Oracle bug #4168725 -
PGA memory leak, which seems to be relevant in our case since the
version of Oracle Server we are running doesn't contain the patch for
this bug.
The only problem is that on our system the jump in memory utilization
seems to occur sporadically after the system was running for weeks
or even months with no downtime of DB server and no significant growth
in memory utilization while the bug description seems to imply that
memory is constantly leaked until there is no memory left for client
processes and then ORA-4030 starts to appear.
The management therefore is not convinced that the memory problem is
caused by bug #4168725 and is reluctant to upgrade to the version with
the patch.
Oracle support also claims that the problem is caused by client
application, although it is difficult to even come up with some
scenario
where client application would cause Oracle server to consume memory
in such way.
Did anybody have experience with this Oracle bug or had similar problem
with memory consumption by Oracle processes? - If so, could you please
share your experience.
IP.
Received on Thu Jul 27 2006 - 16:27:27 CDT
