Solaris: Increase the swap space

Question

Hi all,
I am the developer, not the DBA, but actually should make some DBA-job.
On our solaris server I should increase the swap space, but I don't know how to make this...
From time to time I get the following error message in system log files:
WARNING: Sorry, no swap space to grow stack for pid 21209 (oracle)After this the database write the ORA-04030 and ORA-07445 errors in the alertlog and restarts.
Here are some data from our system:
oracle@dbs:/etc# ulimit -a
core file size (blocks, -c) unlimited
data seg size (kbytes, -d) unlimited
file size (blocks, -f) unlimited
open files (-n) 256
pipe size (512 bytes, -p) 10
stack size (kbytes, -s) 8192
cpu time (seconds, -t) unlimited
max user processes (-u) 29995
virtual memory (kbytes, -v) unlimited
oracle@dbs:~# /usr/sbin/prtconf | grep "Memory size"
Memory size: 16384 Megabytes
oracle@dbs:~# swap -l
swapfile dev swaplo blocks free
/dev/md/dsk/d60 85,60 16 16790384 15262496
oracle@dbs:~# swap -s
total: 12874104k bytes allocated + 1090112k reserved = 13964216k used, 6825384k available
oracle@dbs:~# top -d1 | grep "total swap"
Memory: 16G phys mem, 972M free mem, 8198M total swap, 7465M free swap
SQL> select * from v$pgastat;
NAME                                       VALUE UNIT
aggregate PGA target parameter         629145600 bytes
aggregate PGA auto target               39321600 bytes
global memory bound                    104857600 bytes
total PGA inuse                       4089538560 bytes
total PGA allocated                   4612293632 bytes
maximum PGA allocated                 4746773504 bytes
total freeable PGA memory              359464960 bytes
process count 183
max processes count                          198
PGA memory freed back to OS           1.8291E+12 bytes
total PGA used for auto workareas        7504896 bytes
maximum PGA used for auto workareas    108168192 bytes
total PGA used for manual workareas            0 bytes
maximum PGA used for manual workareas     542720 bytes
over allocation count                   13757980
bytes processed                       2.1787E+13 bytes
extra bytes read/written              3.3085E+11 bytes
cache hit percentage                        98.5 percent
recompute count (total)                 13774288
SQL> select sum(value)
2 from v$sesstat s, v$statname n
3 where s.statistic# = n.statistic#
4 and n.name like '%ga_memory';
SUM(VALUE)
9401696912Need your help.
Many thanks!

Answer 1

Check what is using the memory and if that is necessary.
1. can you safely shrink the SGA ? you would need to check the AWR reports, or recommended sizes.
2. can you safely shrink the PGA ? you would need to check the AWR reports, or recommended sizes)
3. can you reduce the number of processes ? (are there lots of idle processes ?)
4. can you tune sql to use less memory ?
If you can't reduce allocated memory, check if you can add RAM to the server / container.
If you still think you need to increase swap, you may need to add another disk (what is /dev/md/dsk/d60 ?). You can easily google for the Solaris commands to add swap, but if you are not familiar with this process I would not recommend you do it by yourself. Ask Oracle Support to provide the commands, and TEST them on a DEV box, followed by reboots etc to confirm it works.