You can observe this if you get ProcessExplorer, formerly from SysInternals, now available from Microsoft. (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx). This tool does not install anything, so you can run it safely on the server. Each oracle instance shows up as a single process image in the process table, as opposed to *NIX where each oracle background process is a separate entity. On Windows the background processes, server processes, etc. are all threads within the Oracle.exe process image. Cheers, Tony On 11/03/10 7:01 PM, Yechiel Adar wrote: > Some basic windows 32 bit info: > Windows allocate for each program up to 4 GB memory. > Each 4 GB address space is divided: 2 GB belong to the program and 2 GB > to windows. > So each of your instances has 2 GB. > The 2 GB include the oracle instance and the buffers, and all the memory > used by the connections. > > Using the /3GB switch change the division to: 1 GB to windows, 3 GB to > the program. > > Adar Yechiel > Rechovot, Israel > > > > Blessing Kamutande wrote: >> Thank you Niall, >> When you say 800mb is used by user processes are you referring to >> Oracle processes or generally the whole system? >> Also that 2047M is it for this one instance or all instances on the >> server? >> For instance, say I have two instances, do the two instances share the >> 2074M or each instance can grow it's memory usage to 2047M? >> Thank you so much for the explanation. >> Kind Regards >> Blessing >> > -- > //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l > > > > -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l