AIX pinned memory

  • From: "Allen, Brandon" <Brandon.Allen@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: "ORACLE-L" <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Tue, 12 Dec 2006 15:21:10 -0700

Howdy listers,
 
This is actually more of a Unix question, but it is also Oracle related
and I know there are a lot of people on this list more experienced than
I with Unix so I figured I'd give it a shot.
 
I'm running Oracle 10.2.0.2 on AIX 5.3 and am using the pinned SGA
feature (lock_sga=true & v_pinshm=1).  I'm also using the large (16MB)
pages, but I'm not sure if that is relevant.
 
The problem is that the output of vmstat -v and svmon -G both show that
I have about 1.9million pages (1.9M*4K=7.2G) that are currently pinned,
however my Oracle SGA is only 3G, so I'm concerned about the other 4.2GB
that appear to be pinned.  We aren't having any paging or swapping or
other performance problems so this is just a curiosity at this point.
 
I've tried "svmon -P -t 200 -p" to get the top 200 processes sorted by
their pinned memory and when I added it all up - it was only about
3.5GB.  So, how can I figure out what else is accounting for the extra
pinned memory?  My fear is that maybe it is still being pinned from
previous startups of the Oracle instance and now it is just being
wasted, which would mean that it might waste another 3GB if I restarted
the instance w/o rebooting.
 
Any ideas?
 
Thanks,
Brandon
 

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