On the day before last day, my client told me the resource of EC2 instance had been increased, so I decided to increase memory setting for Oracle instance.
The total memory was 4G, so I changed the memory_target to 2800M, and set the option of system parameter filesystemio_options to 'setall', then rebooted the instance, and got below error at first:
SQL> startup ORA-00845: MEMORY_TARGET not supported on this system
The error message was a little misunderstanding, and in fact the issue was that the size of /dev/shm was not enough. I modified the /etc/fstab to get a bigger /dev/shm, then remounted it and got below result:
[root@ip-172-XXX-1-224 ~]# df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/xvda2 500G 70G 431G 14% / devtmpfs 1.9G 0 1.9G 0% /dev tmpfs 3.0G 0 3.0G 0% /dev/shm tmpfs 1.8G 17M 1.8G 1% /run tmpfs 1.8G 0 1.8G 0% /sys/fs/cgroup tmpfs 354M 0 354M 0% /run/user/1000
OK, then started the instance again, and got the 443 error:
SQL> startup ORA-00443: background process "PMON" did not start
I checked the alert log and did not find any useful information, also got no help from Oracle support webiste(Metalink), so even I though the memory_target was not so big to cause this issue, I still decreased it and do some tests, but all of these failed again and again.
I installed the instance just on the previous day, so I made sure it worked well before the change, and I knew if I roll-backed the change it should work again. But now the memory was increased from 2G to 4G, and I did want to make use of more memory. So something was different now, and I should find it.
I recalled one thing that on RHEL7, the /etc/rc.local would not be called after the fresh installation, and I did add one line in it to enable the swap file. so I checked the memory usage again:
[oracle@ip-172-XXX-1-224 shm]$ free
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 3618512 95920 1696860 16648 1825732 3236460
Swap: 0 0 0I noticed there was no swap space. Was this the reason? Now the memory size changed, so I made a new swap file and started the instance again:
[root@ip-172-XXX-1-224 shm]# dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1048576 count=4096 4096+0 records in 4096+0 records out 4294967296 bytes (4.3 GB) copied, 53.2875 s, 80.6 MB/s [root@ip-172-XXX-1-224 shm]# mkswap /swapfile Setting up swapspace version 1, size = 4194300 KiB no label, UUID=ccd1af8b-a182-4a86-8ee0-4bd29dd672ab [root@ip-172-XXX-1-224 shm]# chmod 600 /swapfile [root@ip-172-XXX-1-224 shm]# swapon /swapfile [root@ip-172-XXX-1-224 shm]# su - oracle Last login: Fri Mar 24 02:05:59 EDT 2017 on pts/0 [oracle@ip-172-31-1-224 ~]$ sqlplus "/as sysdba" SQL*Plus: Release 12.2.0.1.0 Production on Fri Mar 24 02:32:12 2017 Copyright (c) 1982, 2016, Oracle. All rights reserved. Connected to an idle instance. SQL> startup ORACLE instance started. Total System Global Area 2936012800 bytes Fixed Size 8625032 bytes Variable Size 2432697464 bytes Database Buffers 486539264 bytes Redo Buffers 8151040 bytes Database mounted. Database opened. SQL> exit
And I checked the memory usage again:
[oracle@ip-172-31-1-224 ~]$ free
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 3618512 400420 159116 885016 3058976 2048104
Swap: 4194300 0 4194300
[oracle@ip-172-31-1-224 ~]$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/xvda2 500G 71G 430G 15% /
devtmpfs 1.9G 0 1.9G 0% /dev
tmpfs 3.0G 848M 2.2G 28% /dev/shm
tmpfs 1.8G 17M 1.8G 1% /run
tmpfs 1.8G 0 1.8G 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs 354M 0 354M 0% /run/user/1000So even the swap space was not used, if the configured memory_target was large and could not be placed in the memory, the instance would not be started!
But why I made the swap file? Why not use a swap partition directly?
- There is no swap for some kinds of AWS EC2 instance.
- The default file system is XFS on RHEL7, and it could not be shrunk.
So when you create a XFS file system, you have to plan the size carefully as it cannot be reduced online like EXT4/3.
