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The UNIX Kill command
Oracle Tips by Burleson Consulting

The UNIX Kill command

As we noted in Chapter 1, there are times when it is necessary to kill all Oracle processes, or a selected set of Oracle processes. You may want to kill all Oracle processes when the database is “locked” and you cannot enter server manager and gracefully stop the database.

When you are forced to terminate Oracle on a UNIX server, you must perform the following steps:

1. Kill all Oracle processes associated with the ORACLE_SID
2. Use the ipcs –pmb command to identify all held RAM memory segments, the then use the ipcrm –m command to release the RAM memory from UNIX.
3. (non_AIX) Use the ipcs –sa command to display held semaphores and then use the ipcrm –s command to release the held semaphores for the instance

As we noted in Chapter 1, we can create a single command to terminate all Oracle processes associated with your hung database instance.

root> ps -ef|grep $ORACLE_SID| \
grep -v grep|awk '{print $2}'|xargs -i kill -9 {}

We can then check for held memory using the ipcs –pmb command, and remove the memory held by the database:

root> ipcs -pmb
IPC status from /dev/kmem as of Mon Sep 10 16:45:16 2001
T ID KEY MODE OWNER GROUP SEGSZ CPID LPID

Shared Memory:

m 24064 0x4cb0be18 --rw-r----- oracle Remote DBA 28975104 1836 23847
m 1 0x4e040002 --rw-rw-rw- root root 31008 572 572
m 2 0x411ca945 --rw-rw-rw- root root 8192 572 584
m 4611 0x0c6629c9 --rw-r----- root root 7216716 1346 23981
m 4 0x06347849 --rw-rw-rw- root root 77384 1346 1361

Here we see that the only RAM memory segment owned by Oracle is ID=24064. The following command will release this memory segment:

root> ipcrm –m 24064