shmmax sizing recommendations
- From: Don Seiler <don@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: ORACLE-L <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 18 Nov 2009 08:56:29 -0600
While troubleshooting an ORA-04030 issue, Oracle Support also took
notice that we had shmmax a bit out of whack. Whether or not this
would contribute to the 04030, I'll not get into right now. This is
Oracle 11.1.0.7 64-bit on OEL 5.3. The server has 64gb of physical
RAM. It hosts 3 RDBMS instances and 1 ASM instance, with a sum total
SGA sizes of ~42 gb and HugePages configured for 44gb. The largest
instance has an SGA of just under 30gb.
OSS first suggested setting shmmax to "RAM times 0.5 but not greater
then 4GB-1" and then pointed me to Doc Id 567506.1:
=== BEGIN QUOTE ===
Oracle Global Customer Support officially recommends a " maximum" for
SHMMAX of just less than 4Gb, or 4294967295.
The maximum size of a shared memory segment is limited by the size of
the available user address space. On 64-bit systems, this is a
theoretical 2^64bytes. So the "theoretical limit" for SHMMAX is the
amount of physical RAM that you have. However, to actually attempt to
use such a value could potentially lead to a situation where no system
memory is available for anything else. Therefore a more realistic
"physical limit" for SHMMAX would probably be "physical RAM - 2Gb".
In an Oracle RDBMS application, this "physical limit" still leaves
inadequate system memory for other necessary functions. Therefore, the
common "Oracle maximum" for SHMMAX that you will often see is "1/2 of
physical RAM". Many Oracle customers chose a higher fraction, at their
discretion.
One last data point for 64-bit Linux systems: A SHMMAX value of 4Gb or
greater will lead to coredump limitations. If a customer is willing to
forfeit complete and successful core file generation under any and all
circumstances, then a SHMMAX value of 4Gb or greater is fine. It is
for this reason that Oracle Global Customer Support officially
recommends a " maximum" for SHMMAX of just less than 4Gb, or
4294967295.
=== END QUOTE ===
I'm wondering what the masters out in the field think. Would you
advise setting SHMMAX to fit the largest SGA? Is there any known
performance hit by having more, smaller segments for an instance
rather than 1 large one?
--
Don Seiler
http://seilerwerks.wordpress.com
ultimate: http://www.mufc.us
--
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