Abnormal increment in background processes on AIX unix (oracle8i)

Question

Hi
We have a problem running oracle8i on AIX unix. Our system is having two
parallel IBM RS6000 servers. Both running in HACMP env. We are using oracle8i with almost 350 clients.
For the last few days we observed that total no of oracle background processes abnormally increasing and touches 400 on each server. We got this information from following command
ps -ef |grep ora |wc -l
The moment it reaches 400 no more sessions are able to connect to the database.
One more thing we have observed that about 150 processes are defunct, which we get from using following commands
ps -ef |grep defunct | wc -l
On killing these processes using
kill -9 <pid>
system is unable to kill it.
When we query from v$session connecting to each servers we hardly found total number of sessions more than 225 on each server.
If anybody has any idea why so many processes are spawned and how to control them please mail me the solution. Or if u require some more information about the system and oracle parameters please let me know. My email_id is
[email protected]
Thanks
SHAKEEL AHMAD

Answer 1

You compare v$process with v$session.
If you have any defunc process, they wont appear in the v$session. But, they resides in the v$process. You need to kill them from the os prompt.
SELECT spid
FROM v$process
WHERE NOT EXISTS ( SELECT 1
FROM v$session
WHERE paddr = addr)
This query gives the osid of all the defunc process and kill them using kill -9 on os.
Are your connection coming from jdbc? Also, you can make use of DCD Dead Connection Detector.
http://asktom.oracle.com/pls/ask/f?p=4950:8:8284822833477458404::NO::F4950_P8_DISPLAYID,F4950_P8_CRITERIA:1784142376742
Jaffar
Message was edited by:
The Human Fly