Oracle 9i Solaris8 Out of Memory

Question

I'm fairly new to oracle and am running into a situation. We recently had the server upgraded to 16GB of RAM from 4GB. I am trying to increase the SGA Size so I can utilize more memory for buffer cache, but receive the ORA-27102 error when attemping to set my SGA_MAX_SIZE parameter to 4,294,967,296 (4GB)
my etc/system is as follows:
set shmsys:shminfo_shmmax=12884901888
set shmsys:shminfo_shmmin=1
set shmsys:shminfo_shmmni=1380
set shmsys:shminfo_shmseg=1290
set semsys:seminfo_semmns=7680
set semsys:seminfo_semmni=1350
set semsys:seminfo_semmsl=2980
Is there something I am missing here? Should I not set SGA_MAX_SIZE and set the individual parameters themselves? I was hoping to utilize the benefits of the SGA Dynamic Sizing for our data loads in the evening by scheduling jobs to adjust the settings.

Answer 1

My thought process was they just upgraded the server with 4x the RAM. As this is only an Oracle DB Server, I figured why waste the RAM and I would attempt to tune the SGA and PGA for best performance
As of now, our SGA is 1GB and our PGA is 1GB
I had read that recommended settings for SGA is .55 of total available ram (after leaving 10-20% for the O/S)
I wanted to increase the buffer cache, utilizing the db_nk_cache_size to store tables/indexes of various sizes in thier own memory segments (i.e. small dimension tables in the 2k, and larger fact tables in the 16k)
I am extremely new to Oracle performance tuning, (i.e. first attempt) and would like to see if I can increase the performance of our overnight data loads
This is a Data Warehouse with peak load times from midnight to 3 am.