Re: Weird database hanging

On 9/18/07, Alex Gorbachev <ag@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Could you paste content of /proc/meminfo?

# cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal:     65907748 kB
MemFree:      35313952 kB
Buffers:        246220 kB
Cached:       25186036 kB
SwapCached:          0 kB
Active:       26538432 kB
Inactive:       886364 kB
HighTotal:           0 kB
HighFree:            0 kB
LowTotal:     65907748 kB
LowFree:      35313952 kB
SwapTotal:    33551744 kB
SwapFree:     33551744 kB
Dirty:             128 kB
Writeback:           0 kB
Mapped:       14456204 kB
Slab:           673304 kB
CommitLimit:  66505616 kB
Committed_AS: 23846764 kB
PageTables:    1554896 kB
VmallocTotal: 536870911 kB
VmallocUsed:    393092 kB
VmallocChunk: 536477779 kB
HugePages_Total:     0
HugePages_Free:      0
Hugepagesize:     2048 kB

>
> I'm not sure not using huge pages can cause such behavior but 16 GB
> SGA without huge pages on Linux is a killer. Normally, memory is
> managed in small 4k blocks. Each process has it's own page table where
> for each page it has location, permissions, and etc. For shared
> memory, each process will have its own entry in page table but only
> when it first accesses it. What can happen with large SGA, default
> page size and many Oracle processes - page table can actually occupy
> more space than SGA in addition to overhead of on-the-fly allocation
> of entries in page table.
>
> That being said, I'm not sure if that's relevant to your case.
> If you get qualified support engineer than s/he could hopefully see a
> clue there.

My SA said he didn't think it would be an issue.  We aren't swapping
at all.  However at this point we're willing to try ANYTHING.

>
> Another option could be to OS trace the processes with high activity
> during the hang but I'd be careful on production. On the other hand -
> it's not working anyway at those times. :)

You mean like a gdb attach?  Oracle Support also asked for this due to
my system state dumps being incomplete.

Don.

>
>
> On 9/18/07, Don Seiler <don@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > 5. We are not using huge pages.  My SA says he'll set it up, since it
> > can't hurt now.  I'm reading the Puschitz tuning page about it now.  I
> > suppose shrinking the SGA or shared pool is always an option.
> >
> > One other difference between old and new servers is that I have
> > enabled the default degree of parallelism on our "warehouse" tables
> > and indexes, and set NOPARALLEL on our frontend objects.  On our old
> > hardware it was kind of random which tables or indexes had it enabled
> > and what degree was set.  Also our parallel_max_servers is 32, where
> > before it was 8.  I don't think it would hurt to bring it down again.
>
>
> --
> Alex Gorbachev, Oracle DBA Brewer, The Pythian Group
> http://www.pythian.com/blogs/author/alex http://www.oracloid.com
> BAAG party - www.BattleAgainstAnyGuess.com
>


-- 
Don Seiler
oracle: http://ora.seiler.us
ultimate: http://www.mufc.us
--
http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l

Other related posts: