Making Oracle RAM non-swappable in HP/UX and Solaris Oracle Tips by Burleson Consulting

Making Oracle RAM non-swappable in HP/UX and Solaris

In several dialects of UNIX (HP/UX and Solaris) it is possible to “pin” the SGA on the UNIX server so that it will never become eligible for a page out. This marking on the RAM region, as non-swappable, tells UNIX never to page out the region and ensure that it always stays in real RAM memory, never going to the swap disk.

Note that you cannot do this on IBM AIX. The pinning is done by setting the following init.ora parameters.

lock_sga=true -- init.ora parm for hp/ux UNIX
USE_ISM=true –- Sun Solaris “Intimate Shared Memory” init.ora parm

Pease note that in Oracle8i (release 8.1.5 and greater) for Solaris, the USE_ISM parameter becomes a hidden parameter and defaults to true. This means that the SGA will always be non-swappable in Solaris.

The above is an excerpt from the "Oracle9i UNIX Administration Handbook" by Oracle press, authored by Donald K. Burleson.

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