Dave, I don't think it matters if you set shmall to a very large number. On my RHEL 5.3 play box, I had # sysctl -a | grep shmall kernel.shmall = 4294967296 After I edited /etc/sysctl.conf: # Controls the maximum number of shared memory segments, in pages #kernel.shmall = 4294967296 kernel.shmall = 4294967296000000 I didn't do sysctl -p, but rebooted the box. After that, everything is backup normal. To me, it's just an artificial number like shmmax in the sense that it has no other meaning than preventing you from creating something above it. Shmmax caps the single segment size and shmall caps the total SysV shared memory size in unit of page (regardless regular 4k or HugepageSize). Yong Huang -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l