ORA-27300, ORA-27301, ORA-27302 on AIX (Doc ID 1541121.1)

Last updated on DECEMBER 02, 2022

Applies to:

Symptoms

Received following errors in alert log:

ORA-27300: OS system dependent operation:fork failed with status: 12
ORA-27301: OS failure message: Not enough space
ORA-27302: failure occurred at: skgpspawn3

- AIX server became unusable.

- OS commands such as ps returns malloc or fork errors.

- Can not connect to the database

- Command line hangs

- There are many defunct kernel processes.  Following OS command list any defunct processes:

# ps -ef | grep defunct

username 12610 1 0 - ? 0:00 <defunct>

- No Oracle or user process is using abnormal amount of memory. 

Check if the biggest user of PGA memory is showing PGA_ALLOC_MEM in the 100s MBytes or higher and keep growing by running following query:

SET LINESIZE 120
SET PAGESIZE 120
COLUMN spid HEADING 'OSpid' FORMAT a8
COLUMN pid HEADING 'Orapid' FORMAT 999999
COLUMN sid HEADING 'Sess id' FORMAT 99999
COLUMN serial# HEADING 'Serial#' FORMAT 999999
COLUMN status HEADING 'Status' FORMAT a8
COLUMN pga_alloc_mem HEADING 'PGA alloc' FORMAT 99,999,999,999
COLUMN pga_used_mem HEADING 'PGA used' FORMAT 99,999,999,999
COLUMN username HEADING 'Oracle user' FORMAT a12
COLUMN osuser HEADING 'OS user' FORMAT a12
COLUMN program HEADING 'Program' FORMAT a20

SELECT p.spid,
p.pid,
s.sid,
s.serial#,
s.status,
p.pga_alloc_mem,
p.pga_used_mem,
s.username,
s.osuser,
s.program
FROM v$process p, v$session s
WHERE s.paddr( + ) = p.addr
ORDER BY p.pga_alloc_mem DESC;

Cause

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