Oracle9 does not releases the reserved virtual memory

[Sachin Dev]

N4000/HP-UX 11.00/Oracle9

The Oracle instance reserves the Virtual Memory for the swap area, when oracle is restarted the Virtual Memory is not released, the result is if we restart the oracle because of the configuration changes, the system runs out of memory.
The out put of swapinfo is attached to show the memory usage.

Please advice where can I start to look for the solution.

[Wodisch]

Hi,

actually that could an old problem still being alive:
Oracle did not release shared memory segments when shut down FAST ENOUGH, so you (your scripts) had to wait some ten seconds, before your could re-start the instance...

Just my $0.02,
Wodisch

[Brian Crabtree]

You also might want to look into how the database is being shutdown as well. A "shutdown abort" can cause memory segments not to be cleaned up quickly, and in some cases can leave a process running from the database which will continue to hold the memory. After shutting down the database, try running "ps" to see if there are processes still running. You can also use "ipcs" to see if there are shared memory segments still held. You can remove these with the "ipcrm" command.

Brian

[Sachin Dev]

I am using the Shutdown immediate command to stop ORACLE.

I was waiting for around 5 min to see if the memory is released.

I was not able to find out any ora process from the ps command.

Please advice,
Thanks

[Tore_1]

from output:

after you shutdown database/stop backup, you have 20G available swap, so you should be able to start database given that it only reserves 9G. If you cant start database in this circumstance you might want to make sure that the system parameters allows you to use all swapspace (kmtune | grep -i -e swap -e swch)
As long as you have available swap, you should not run out of memory.

[Sachin Dev]

The Oracle restarts till it is able to reserve the Virtual Memory, the problem comes after 3rd or 4th Oracle restart, where there is no more memory left.
Every time it reserves a minimum of 4GB and never releases that.
Regards,