Re: High swap utilization when running Oracle 9i

[Stephen Gardner <stephen-rhel uk org>]

On Wed, 30 Mar 2005, Dirk Gfroerer wrote:

> I've migrated a machine from RHEL3 to RHEL4 which is serving four Oracle 9i 
> databases. Before the migration the machine was hardly using any swap. No 
> suprise here, since the database parameters were set in a way that all four 
> databases did fit into the 2GB RAM.
>
> However I did have to add the following line into /etc/sysctl.conf for RHEL3
>
> vm.pagecache = 1 10 20
>
> This has been discussed in depth on the Taroon list. My question is now, do I 
> have to set the same parameter in RHEL 4? Or is there a new kernel parameter 
> which has to be tweaked in order to prevent the database and its buffers 
> being paged out to disk? I thought this "issue" was solved in the 2.6 kernel 
> series. But obviously I'm wrong.

Dirk,
    I haven't done the Oracle 9i + RHEL4 combination but I did notice a 
reference to the following URL on the fedora-devel list today which 
discusses installing Oracle 9i on Fedora Core 3. FC3 is fairly closely 
related to RHEL4 so it may help.

http://www.pagux.com/oracle9ionfedora3.html

    Naturally there are some package differences between RHEL4 and FC3 so 
I cannot be certain that everything referenced is available in RHEL4. The 
document does references some of the kernel parameters needed but does not 
include a reference to  vm.pagecache.

Regards,
    Stephen

References:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2005-March/msg01546.html    Fedora-devel list posting