Hello, Given the experience we have had recently, I am not 100% sure if this issue is merely confined to 2.4 kernels. Just to share our recent experience... Few weeks back we were facing instance crashes on a rac cluster (10.2.0.3, linux 2.6.9-55.0.6.0.1.ELsmp) encountered only during the rman runtime window and subsequent troubleshooting / research led to reducing the parallelism / filesperset for the rman configuration. That has so far avoided the zero memory/swap scenario we saw in some oracle trace files and we haven't had any instance crashes during rman backup window since then. Although, o.s. utilities had continued to show a relatively "normal" system from a memory /swap stand point during those problematic rman backup window times. So, given what we have seen, I would agree w/Christo that it is an issue associated with large/heavy i/o operations/filesystem cache. -Rajeev On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 1:38 PM, Christo Kutrovsky <kutrovsky.oracle@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Hello, > > This is known issue with 2.4 kernels. It's not so much to do with low > memory, but incorrect memory counting from the OOM module. > It is related with large file io operations, which use a lot of file > system cache. > > Enable DIRECTIO (filesystem_options=directio). In 2.4 kernel you have > either DIRECTIO or ASYNC for ext3 (I am assuming you are using ext3). > Not both, if you do "setall" async will take precedence. > > Note that this will only help you with your duplicate. If you start a > "cp" someone will get killed. I believe there's a bugfix for the 2.4 > kernel. Make sure you are using latest 2.4 kernel. > > If you really need more info, I can try to lookup the kernel that had > this issue, and the kernel that did not. > > > -- > Christo Kutrovsky > DBA Team Lead > The Pythian Group - www.pythian.com > I blog at http://www.pythian.com/blogs/ -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l