Oracle Instances and real memory consumption on Linux and Solaris

There’s a way to know the REAL memory usage by Oracle Instance, including all connecting processes and using the shell rather than a connection to oracle?

The short answer is “I think so” 🙂

Summing up RSS column from ps output, is not reliable because Linux uses a copy-on-write on process forks and also doesn’t take into account correctly the shared memory and other shared allocations.

I’ve come across this post on Pythian’s Blog from Marc Billette.

While it seems good I’ve had discording results depending on platform and release.

Instead, I’ve tried to create a shell snippet that always uses pmap but works differently and SEEMS to work correctly on Linux ans Solaris.

Basically, using the pmap script I get a lot of information about the different memory areas allocated to the process:

 

Initially I’ve tried to decode correctly the different kinds of memory the same way other scripts I’ve found online do:

but finally the ADDRESS is the same from different processes when the memory area is shared, so my script now just get a unique line for each address and sums up the memory size (not the rss one!):

This should give the total virtual memory allocated by the different Oracle instances.

The results I get are plausible both on Linux and Solaris.

Example:

If you find any error let me know and I’ll fix the script!

Ludovico

Regular TNS-12508 critical alerts in EM12c

Yesterday I’ve come across a small request from a customer.
They were receiving REGULARLY critical alerts in EM12c from some listeners due to error TNS-12508.

The facts:

  • only 10g listeners were affected
  • every day, only one occurrence of the error and always at the same time on a named host
  • no apparent correlations between times on different hosts

I’ve analyzed the log to see the error.

 

Notice that after the error there are two requests: show log_directory and show trc_directory.
So I’ve supposed that it’s an additional request failing on 10g listeners but not on 11g listeners.
The “help” command of 10g and 11g releases shows that the two releases have some different commands. One of them is “show oracle_home” that has been introduced in 11g.

  • First I’ve searched for scheduled scripts (the customer literally have a huge library of scripts run against the databases to automate maintenance tasks)
  • Then I’ve asked to the team that manages an automatic discovery tool that feeds the CMDB
  • Finally, I’ve come across this note on Metalink that explain the error:

Repetitive TNS-12508 Errors logged for a listener target after upgrade to 12.1.0.3 DB plugin or higher (Doc ID 1596633.1)

I’ve applied the change to the metrics in EM12c to ignore the error for 10g listeners.

Ludovico