During Concurrent Multiple Instance Startup for a Single RDBMS Home 11gR2 Process SMCO died - ORA-27140: Attach To Post/wait Facility Failed for one or More Instances: Restart is fine

Last updated on JUNE 01, 2017

Applies to:

Symptoms

During patching, 11gR2 databases sharing a single home encounter the  following errors during the concurrent startups of more than one database/instance.

Changes

First instance startups after patching: In particular a conflict occurs with multiple processes while concurrently updating more than one database from the single home .

• This problem does not exist in 12c
• The problem can occur after upgrades if there are multiple databases sharing a single-patched 11gR2 Oracle_Home that has several database / instances 
  
• The problem was seen on more than one RDBMS patchset level for the same 11gR2 databases and was also seen across several different instances on multiple Oracle Homes.
• While the problem may be seen during multiple instance concurrent startups, it has not been verified that the problem only occurs after 11g upgrades
• Meaning: it may be the concurrent startup itself of multiple instances for 11gR2 that generates the error
  - The processes newly added to the 11g version associated with the errors are non-critical and can be disabled.

Cause