Re: Oracle10g issue - times() call fails

[Matthias Saou <thias spam spam spam spam spam spam spam egg and spam freshrpms net>]

Marko Asplund wrote :

> i'm having weird problems with Oracle10gR2 on RHEL 4 Update 3 (WS) on  
> an IA32 system.
> 
> the Oracle server has been running fine for quite a while now but all  
> of a sudden it started eating up processing resources and now the  
> load is at 15 with only the Oracle server running.
> 
> i tried connecting to the database instance using sqlplus but  
> strangely 'sqlplus /nolog' command just seems to wait forever without  
> giving any output.
> 
> i did a strace for this command, here's how it looks like:
> 
> ...
> open("/opt/oracle10g/u01/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/db_1/rdbms/mesg/ 
> ocius.msb", O_RDONLY) = 6
> fcntl64(6, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC)         = 0
> lseek(6, 0, SEEK_SET)                   = 0
> read(6, "\25\23\"\1\23\3\t\t\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0"...,  
> 256) = 256
> lseek(6, 512, SEEK_SET)                 = 512
> read(6, "\337y\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0"...,  
> 512) = 512
> lseek(6, 1024, SEEK_SET)                = 1024
> read(6, "\25\7\'\0072\7>\7j\7\276\17$\'\6K5S\24TfT\307T(VsV\222"...,  
> 86) = 86
> times(NULL)                             = -2147233465
> times(NULL)                             = -2147233465
> times(NULL)                             = -2147233465
> ...
> 
> the times() system call is called over and over until i terminate the  
> process.
> 
> i made a small test program which just calls times() and prints the  
> value (printf("%d") and times() gives similar values in the test  
> program as in the strace. errno is set to 0.
> 
> any ideas on why times() calls fail?
> 
> uptime is at 198 and kernel version is 2.6.9-22.ELsmp.

I've had the exact same problem with a 10g database on a Dell PowerEdge
2750 (i386) with RHEL4 AS fully updated about two weeks ago. Can't remember
which kernel it was running, but to minimise the downtime of the database,
the server was rebooted (to the latest kernel) and Oracle started up fine
again.

When I straced the sqlplus command I saw the exact same "times(NULL)"
forever... it was impossible to get it to work, thus to restart the
database.

Now try debugging the problem... that's what you get for running
proprietary closed source stuff :-(

Matthias

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