OT : kernel using 75% of CPU

[Jerry C]

Hi there,

 

I have a Sun e4500, running Solaris 2.7 and Oracle 8.1.7.1.0. Everything looks normal from a database perspective, but when I run "top" it show the kernel being very hog-like:

 

load averages: 14.38, 15.18, 15.18                                     07:16:21
126 processes: 118 sleeping, 4 running, 4 on cpu
CPU states:  0.6% idle, 26.6% user, 72.8% kernel,  0.0% iowait,  0.0% swap
Memory: 4096M real, 63M free, 216M swap in use, 5310M swap free

 

  PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE  SIZE   RES STATE   TIME    CPU COMMAND
 2286 oracle     1   0    0 1844M 1814M run     9:44 13.90% oracle
11068 oracle     1   0    0 2056K 1536K cpu0    0:02  1.53% top
11333 oracle     1   0    0 1150M 1124M cpu1    0:01  1.39% oracle
 5944 oracle     1  40    0 1820M 1789M sleep  14:40  1.36% oracle
 4797 root       1  50    0 2112K 1248K sleep   6:01  1.36% top
11346 oracle     1   0    0  110M   92M cpu0    0:01  1.26% oracle
11114 oracle     1   0    0 1009M  984M cpu1    0:00  0.66% oracle
11157 oracle     1   0    0 1009M  984M run     0:00  0.63% oracle
11368 oracle     1  33    0 1794M 1765M sleep   0:00  0.29% oracle
19558 oracle     1  60    0 1797M 1751M sleep  78:28  0.28% oracle
19554 oracle     1  60    0 1794M 1751M sleep  38:05  0.20% oracle
11366 oracle     1  55    0 1793M 1763M sleep   0:00  0.19% oracle
11292 oracle     1  26    2 2008K 1424K run     0:00  0.19% dsql

 

Any ideas on what I, as a lowly DBA, would be able to check? It's a bit out of my area and I'm stumped...

 

 

Thanks!

 

Jerry