Semaphore Processes - Oracle/Documentum

[Rob Smith]

This may be more of an applications problem but I thought I would give this forum a try:

I have a K box running 10.20 with Oracle/Documentum. Every night a script shuts down Oracle/Documentum and does a cold backup. When the system comes back online Documentum adds two more semaphore processes in addition to the two that were running before the backup. These semaphore processes only disappear after a system reboot. So if I back up 20 times I have 40 of these semaphores out there. There are usually only 2 or 3 for Oracle and the ones owned by root usually stay the same. My questions are, and maybe I should have asked this first, what is a semaphore anyway? If there are too many of them could this cause a system crash? I discovered this while investigating a Documentum crash, at that point there were around 90 owned by Documentum. Anybody have any experience with Documentum in regards to this problem? Any help would be appreciated, many TIAs in advance!

[MARTINACHE]

Hi,

You can use "ipcs -s" and "ipcrm -s" in order to display and remove semaphores.

I don't know why this semaphores are not free during database shutdown but it sounds like a bug. Did you ask for a patch from Oracle ?

Regards,

Patrice.