RAM & Swap

[Steven E. Protter]

Let me add my 1 cent to Jeff's two.

I was trying to tell you the same thing. He did a better job.

We have a 2 GB floor on memory for our rp5450 servers.

We did get away with 1 GB on a D380 production environment, but most people would say that was not a heavy use environment.

Get RAM!

:=)

SEP

[Todd McDaniel_1]

No Points here...


But I thought that HPUX "recommended" 2GB of Memory? Or I think that is required for Vpar/Npars...

I could be wrong.

[Victor BERRIDGE]

Hi again,
I erased the end part of my previous reply, you should have read "configured with 256 MB of RAM"...
I just checked and found a D210 still running with 10.20 and oracle 7.2.3 with 128MB RAM and 300 MB swap
there is also a D220 with 10.20 with 3 instances (2 7.2.3 & a 7.3.3) with 1 GB RAM and 1 GB swap...


All the best

Victor

[Ted Buis]

Since Todd mentioned it, the absolute minimum amount of RAM for HP-UX is:
10.20 - 32MB
11.0 32 bit - 32MB
11.0 64 bit - 64MB
11.11 - 256MB
However, the recommended minimum for 11.0 and 11i 64-bit is 512MB RAM, but the ideal minimum starts at 2GB. Still, I wouldn't suggest that you do Oracle with less than 1 GB of RAM in general. Generally, I would recommend increasing RAM also with more processors, so that you have something in RAM for those CPUs to use, rather than waiting on an I/O.

[Dave Wherry]

Jeff and SEP had some good comments about their minimum memory on their servers which are both good recomendations.
You are running UX 10.2 so is that 32 bit Oracle you have? If so you're limited to 1.75GB of shared memory so a large memory system will not benefit you any way. Unless you start playing with memory windows.

[Bill Hassell]

NOTE: HP recommended RAM is to allow HP-UX to bootup and run SAM--nothing more. Oracle is an expensive product that can perform extremely well unless it has to swap. Then it is a dog, as any other application will be when access to memory faces a 100:1 penalty. 512megs is critcally short. If you add additional swap then at least the processes will run but other than a very simple database with very few users, Oracle will spend the vast majority of its time waiting for memory.

Now 10.20 (which is obsolete and unsupported) can only run in 32bit mode so the maximum memory you can use is 3.75Gb. Anything beyond that cannot be addressed by HP-UX or applications. If you are happy with the performance of the database and comfortable that 10.20 has not been patched for a year (and never will be in the future), then just add more swap whenever the programs need more RAM.