AIX: “WARNING: Heavy swapping observed on system in last 5 mins.”

Quick one today!

Having message below in your 11.2.0.3 on AIX like this?

WARNING: Heavy swapping observed on system in last 5 mins. 
pct of memory swapped in [31.28%] pct of memory swapped out [3.81%]. 
Please make sure there is no memory pressure and the SGA and PGA are configured correctly. 
Look at DBRM trace file for more details.

Stand down, this issue is caused by unpublished Bug 11801934, mentioned in MOS False Swap Warning Messages Printed To Alert.log On AIX (Doc ID 1508575.1).

Basically happens because the v$osstat does not reflect proper stats for the swap space paging.

So, stay calm and see you next week!

RAC on AIX: Network Best Practices

Hi all!
A few time ago I passed by some performance issues on AIX working with instances with different configuration (proc/mem). The root cause was basically the inefficient configuration of networking for interconnect (UDP).
As you know, the UDP is a non-response (for that reason with less metadata and faster) protocol. By the default, every server have a pool to send udp (and tcp) messages and another to recieve.
In my situation, once there was an ‘inferior’ instance, the pools were automatically set smaller in this one, and it was causing a high interconnection block sending statistics from other instances. In deed, it was lots of resends caused by overflows in this smaller instance…

There is one one to evaluete how much loss are you having for UDP in your AIX server:

netstat -s | grep 'socket buffer overflows'

If you are having considerable number of overflows, it’s recommended to reavaluate the sized of your udp_recvspace. And, of course, maintain the calculation of pools.

Oracle recommends, at least:

tcp_recvspace = 65536
tcp_sendspace = 65536
udp_sendspace = ((DB_BLOCK_SIZE * DB_FILE_MULTIBLOCK_READ_COUNT) + 4 KB) but no lower than 65536
udp_recvspace = 655360 (Minimum recommended value is 10x udp_sendspace, parameter value must be less than sb_max)
rfc1323 = 1
sb_max = 4194304
ipqmaxlen = 512

This and others details about configuring RAC on AIX ban be found in note: RAC and Oracle Clusterware Best Practices and Starter Kit (AIX) (Doc ID 811293.1)

I’d recommend you take a look too.

Have a nice day!
Matheus.

AIX: NTP Service Basics

Hi all,
I always forget the command and have to search it again. For further searches, I expect to found in my own posts… 🙂

> To start Service

startsrc -s xntpd

> To stop Service

stopsrc -s xntpd

> Configuration File

/etc/ntpd.conf

Expect it be useful to you too.
See ya!
Matheus.

Grepping Alert by Day

Hi all,
For that moment when your alert is very big and some OS doesn’t “work very well with it” (in my case was using AIX), I jerry-ringged the shellscript bellow. It puts in a new log just the log entries of a selected day.

24 7 365

The call can be made with two or three parameters, this way:

Parameters:
PAR1:
name of alert (the main alert.log)
PAR2: Day you want to, in the format “Mon dd”. Below an example.
PAR3: [optional] desired year. The default is the current year. But is useful specially on the “new year” period…

Examples:
Ex1: sh grep_day.sh alert_xxdb_1.log “Apr 12”
Ex2: sh grep_day.sh alert_xxdb_1.log “Apr 12” 2014

Generated files:
dalert_2015Apr12.log
dalert_2014Apr12.log

# Script grep_day.sh
if [ $# -lt 3 ]; then
YEAR=`date +"%Y"`
else YEAR=$3
fi
DATEFORMAT=`echo $2|cut -d' ' –f1`""`echo $2|cut -d' ' –f2`
BEG=`cat $1 |grep -n "$2" |grep $YEAR |head -1 |cut -d':' -f1`
FIN=`cat $1 |grep -n "$2" | grep $YEAR |tail -1 |cut -d':' -f1`
NMB=`expr $FIN - $BEG`
cat $1 |head -$FIN |tail -$NMB > dalert_$YEAR$DATEFORMAT.log

Belive me! It can be useful…. haha

See ya!

Matheus.