Re: High swap utilization when running Oracle 9i

[Dirk Gfroerer <Dirk Gfroerer guh-software de>]

>     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.
Stephen,

thanks for helping out. Oracle has certified 9i on RHEL 4 and there's a 
document (B13670-06)  on the Oracle Technet 
http://www.oracle.com/technology/documentation/oracle9i.html which 
describes quite well how to install 9i on RHEL 4 (you need some 
additional patches and rpms from MetaLink). It worked flawlessly and the 
databases are back up running. I removed the 
compat-oracle-rhel4-1.0-3.rpm after the installation since I don't like 
my gcc being replaced by an Oracle shell script :o).

The problem I'm facing now, is, that the machine was using hardly any 
swap with RHEL 3 (with vm.pagecache = 1 10 20). Currently the machine is 
using 600 MB of swap. From how the machine is responding, it seems like 
the Oracle buffers were paged out, which is ... suboptimal. vm.pagecache 
no longer exists on RHEL 4. I think for a 2.6 kernel I should be using 
vm.swapiness. However I'd like to hear from other people what they're 
doing, before playing around with kernel parameters.

Thanks,
Kind Regards,
Dirk