Insufficient System Resources !!!

[rsuri]

This may or may not be directly related to Oracle but hey, that's where diversity comes into picture...

I have an Oracle 8i (8.1.5) DSS system running on NT 4.0 (SP 6) on an HP LXR-8500 server.

The database size is 37GB

When I shutdown the database for cold backup and try to backup the files, somewhere down the road we get an error message --

"Insufficient system resources exist to complete the requested service"

The error shows up after copying about 20GB of datafiles.

This server has 4GB of RAM, 6GB of Pagefile and plenty of free space. The CPU usage is < 40%

Some of the datafiles are 5GB size (I don't think that old 2GB limit should matter for this system)

Obviously it does not seem to be an Oracle problem but then --
if I leave the database open and copy the open files, it copies everything !!!

So the problem arises only when I shutdown the database (thus closing the files)

There is nothing wrong with any datafile; I can copy each file individually without any problem. For the time being I have broken my backup into 2 jobs and I Boot the server in between in order to finish the second phase of backup.

This seems more like a Paged Memory Pool issue with NT or HP but I am posting it here in case somebody has gone thru this already.

Thanks,
- Rajeev

[pwoneill]

Odd problem. I'm not really sure what the cause is, I just wanted to make sure that if you're using a backup script that copies all of your files while the database is open, that you're doing it with a hotbackup, ie

alter tablespace xxxx begin backup;
(copy the related datafiles)
alter tablespace xxxx end backup;

and keeping track of archived logs, because just copying the datafiles while the database is open won't work as a cold backup. I'm sure you are doing it correctly but felt the need to make sure :)

[rsuri]

Thanks Pat,
Yes, I am aware of 'alter tablespace ... begin backup';
The files I copied were just for the test to prove that there is some memory allocation/deallocation problem when those Oracle datafiles are closed.

- Rajeev

[tamilselvan]

I have a doubt on managing >4GB data file in NT. I am not sure. NT can not access more than 4 GB RAM unless you install an additional software from INTEL to access beyond 4 GB RAM. Try to resize the data file to less than 4GB and do the back up again. Mostly you will not get an error.

[rsuri]

Thanks tamilselvan,
Do you know what that software from Intel is ?
Is this 4GB limitation for RAM or filesize ?

- Rajeev

[marist89]

Reboot during a backup? Lets not get into ( [url]http://www.dbasupport.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=5761[/url] ) again...

Are you using a third-party backup agent that might be causing your resource problem?

[rsuri]

No it's not a third party issue; I tried a simple copy over the network as well; It's either HP or NT.

I followed that "Solaris vs. NT" thread all the way to the end; quite interesting. I really don't care much about NT or Unix because I am mainly an Oracle DBA.
We have all NT, HP-UX and Sun Solaris here depending upon the size of the database and number of users.

This is the only NT box where I have faced so many problems.

I am planning to create new Tablespaces with smaller size datafiles (2GB) and move the objects there to test.

- Rajeev