UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello all,

I have the folowing question: I have an E450 with Solaris 2.6 running in a cluster environment. The primary node runs Oracle 8.1.5. My problem is: every time the Oracle Database is shutdown, the "w"colum in vmstat command jumps to "30". In man page for vmstat command, the "w" colum means "runnable but swapped". I can't imagine what that realy means. Does anyboy have an idea of what that realy means and why that hapens? This behavior started when we had a disk crash in the boot disk e=and we replaced it.

Thanks in advance

HTT

Well, gosh...runnable means runnable...able to be run. If a process is not runnable it must be waiting for something to occur, like a signal or an i/o operation.

Swapped means that the entire process is sitting on disk in the swap area. If it wasn't swapped, it would be in memory.

Having processes swapped out is not good, it means you really need more memory.

If you really get exactly 30 such processes each time that you shutdown your database, I would guess that they are database processes of some kind that were sleeping, then got swapped, and finally awoken by the shutdown process. But I don't have much to go on here and that is just a guess.