Thank you for the suggestions so far.
Rocky Welch suggesting increasing the "processes" parameter in the init.ora
I tried that with one of the 8.1.6 databases.
The "processes" parameter was set to 50, I increased it to 200, shut down that database, restarted the listener (lsnrctl>stop and lsnrctl>start) and restarted the database. I still got "ORA-12500: TNS:listener failed to start a dedicated server process" when trying to connect to that database from the client.
John Kangaraj has suggested checking the number of semaphores. I forgot to mention before that I had already looked at that also (I've been bitten by semaphores before.) I counted 780 semaphores being used (from ipcs) and 1024 being the maximum allowed (from /etc/system). (see below)
I'm still new to Sun Solaris and I'm totally stumped. Does anyone else have any other ideas? I really would prefer not running multi-threaded server (MTS) if I don't have to, which was one of the suggestions on Metalink.
Am I interpreting the available memory information correctly? (see below) For physical memory, I think I see 4GB available and 622 MB being used. As far as swap, I see approx. 4GB available.
---------------- semaphores
In /etc/system I see this:
set semsys:seminfo_semmns=1024
ipcs shows me this:
$ ipcs -sa
IPC status from <running system> as of Tue May 22 12:46:49 PDT 2001
T ID KEY MODE OWNER GROUP CREATOR CGROUP NSEMS OTIME CTIME
Semaphores:
s 5505024 0x6f61806 --ra-r----- oracle dba oracle dba 204 12:46:49 13:02:49
s 262145 0 --ra-r----- oracle dba oracle dba 50 17:52:20 10:46:15
s 1703938 0x2f18d66 --ra-ra---- oracle dba oracle dba 59 12:42:31 14:12:02
s 983043 0xc934c46 --ra-r----- oracle dba oracle dba 54 1:25:44 13:03:40
s 524292 0x81a8556 --ra-r----- oracle dba oracle dba 79 12:46:34 13:06:43
s 2424837 0x40b7ad6 --ra-r----- oracle dba oracle dba 204 1:29:56 13:07:46
s 589830 0 --ra-r----- oracle dba oracle dba 50 12:06:06 19:22:22
s 1048584 0 --ra-r----- oracle dba oracle dba 80 4:03:18 15:55:22
Total: 780
----------------- end of semaphore information
----------------- physical memory
$ /usr/sbin/prtconf | grep -i mem
Memory size: 4096 Megabytes
memory (driver not attached)
virtual-memory (driver not attached)
$ ipcs -pmb
IPC status from <running system> as of Tue May 22 13:15:58 PDT 2001
T ID KEY MODE OWNER GROUP SEGSZ CPID LPID
Shared Memory:
m 0 0x5000005b --rw-r--r-- root root 4 417 417
m 4201 0x9167ce10 --rw-r----- oracle dba 58998784 26660 7608
m 802 0x63973b5c --rw-r----- oracle dba 5824512 16908 5642
m 1403 0xc7294a0c --rw-rw---- oracle dba 18743296 7115 7584
m 604 0x826b2278 --rw-r----- oracle dba 93601792 27580 7251
m 1005 0x59b783a4 --rw-r----- oracle dba 146014208 1066 7579
m 1807 0xc6e2a74 --rw-r----- oracle dba 4268032 13480 4674
m 2809 0x27a21464 --rw-r----- oracle dba 325394432 26885 17005
----------------- end of physical memory information
----------------- swap space
$ /usr/sbin/swap -s
total: 910872k bytes allocated + 2232248k reserved = 3143120k used, 4208264k available
----------------- end of swap space information
