file system problem

[Madan Kumar]

Hi All,
I have a HPUX 11.11. server, We have a /archive file system whose backup is taken by DP through RMAN. after the backup oracle archives get deleted automatically. My concern is that after deletion of the files, this file system shows that it is still occupied, last time it happened and after bouncing the database file system utilization was 0%. Any idea why it is happening.

Thanks
Madan.

[Suraj K Sankari]

Hi,
>>My concern is that after deletion of the files, this file system shows that it is still occupied,

This happened after delete files from file system. Some cases you need to wait for 1 or 2 minutes to show the impact.
If its not showing the empty spaces then you can used lsof

With lsof you will know which are the open files are residing to your file system.
If you find any open file kill the pid and enjoy.

To know how to use lsof please go through the below link

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-lsof.html

Suraj

[R.K. #]

Hi..

As said you can use lsof to find files such files.
bdf and du will show the size difference of deleted files for the file system.

# bdf /ora_temp
# du -sk /ora_temp

Lsof utility can be downloaded from:
http://hpux.connect.org.uk/hppd/hpux/Sysadmin/lsof-4.82/

This will give the output of processes which are using deleted files.
# lsof +aL1 /ora_temp

List open files that are using file system /ora_temp
# lsof /ora_temp

Regds..

[Duncan Edmonstone]

2 interesting replies, along the right track in terms of identifying that files may still be open when they are deleted, but both of which fix the symptoms and not the problem...

If you are using RMAN to backup the archivelogs, are you also using RMAN to delete them after they are backed up? If so, you should _not_ see this problem. What version of Oracle.

Can you share the RMAN script used as part of the DP backup and an example backup session log?

HTH

Duncan

[Viktor Balogh]

"Large descrepencies between 'du' and 'bdf' are symptomatic of an inuse file having been removed.

Disk space is not returned to the system until the last process using a file is closed.
A common and valuable technique is to open a file; immediately unlink() (remove) it;
and continue to use it for the duration of the process. When the process terminates,
without further adieu, the used disk blocks are returned to the available pool.

THis is the way UNIX works and applies to any release."

"You can use 'lsof' to find files like this by doing:

# lsof +D / +L1

Look for files with a 'NLINK' count of zero (0). These represent open files that will vanish as soon as
the last process using them terminates. Once the last process using the file exits, the (now) temporarily
allocated disk blocks will be returned to the system."