If a session process fails or is explicitly told to rollback pmon uses the session process to do the work. I suspect that when you killed the processes you effectively killed the pmon rollback operation so smon took over. -- Mark D Powell -- Phone (313) 592-5148 ________________________________ From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of amonte Sent: Wednesday, January 31, 2007 10:09 AM To: Kevin Lidh Cc: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: pmon & smon transaction recovery/rollback yes, I think you mean setting event 10513 to level 2, however my question is, isnt that really a pmon's job? On 1/31/07, Kevin Lidh < kevin.lidh@xxxxxxxxx <mailto:kevin.lidh@xxxxxxxxx> > wrote: A long time ago on a database far, far away, we killed a process which was in the process of consuming a large amount of temp and SMON worked for hours on that tablespace. We actually had to set an event to "pause" SMON until we had the time to allow TEMP to be cleaned up. On Wed, 2007-01-31 at 12:53 +0100, amonte wrote: > Hi > > I have a basic question, we all know that pmon's task is to cleanup > resource by failed processes such as rolling back transaction, > releasing locks and resources etc. We also know that smon rolls back > uncommited transactions after instance failure. > > My question is, I killed a couple of processes this morning and smon > went crazy performing parallel recovery, I was wondering shouldnt that > pmon's job? There was no instance failure. > > TIA > > Alex >