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Executing the 'maxmem' Utility on Oracle Solaris on Sparc (64-bit) Platforms Locks All Server Memory, Potentially Causing Oracle Server ORA-04030 Errors, Instance Crash, and OS Server Unresponsiveness (Doc ID 2160282.1)

Last updated on FEBRUARY 18, 2019

Applies to:

Oracle Database Cloud Schema Service - Version N/A and later
Oracle Database Exadata Cloud Machine - Version N/A and later
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure - Database Service - Version N/A and later
Oracle Database Backup Service - Version N/A and later
Oracle Database Cloud Exadata Service - Version N/A and later
Oracle Solaris on SPARC (64-bit)

Symptoms

A legacy utility that is shipped with the Oracle server is called 'maxmem', and it is located in $ORACLE_HOME/bin/. It's original purpose was to assess free memory availability on the server, but it is not used by any other Oracle executable at this time. On other operating systems, this utility quickly returns an assessment of free memory on the system. However, when launched on Oracle Solaris on Sparc (64-bit) servers, this utility quickly locks all free memory on the server and does not release it.

This can lead to database errors, instance crash, and ultimately the entire server machine becomes unresponsive. Eg:

ORA-27300: OS system dependent operation:fork failed with status: 11
ORA-27301: OS failure message: Resource temporarily unavailable
ORA-27302: failure occurred at: skgpspwn10
ORA-27303: additional information: childpid 56665, read pid 0

 

ORA-4030: out of process memory when trying to allocate 824504 bytes (pga
heap,kco buffer)
ORA-7445: exception encountered: core dump [kgdsdst()+16] [SIGSEGV]

Cause

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In this Document
Symptoms
Cause
Solution
References


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