Oracle 8.1.7 and 9i on same AIX server
 

We have upgraded all our AIX servers to Oracle 9i. However there is 1
application that will not run on 9i and 8.1.7 is required. Our DBAs are
running both versions of Oracle on the same 2 servers. We have 15
other servers that have been running with no issues and they are
running only Oracle 9i. The 2 servers that are running both versions
of Oracle periodicly lock-up and a reboot is required. IBM analized
the dumps and found no memory issues.


The symptoms are:


Users can not telnet to server
If already logged on at console you have a command line where you can
enter commands but they all return the same error.


"could not load program (command name) - dependent module
libbsd.a(shr.o) could not be loaded
system error:not enough space"


Dump analysis shows no space issue related to paging or memory. We are
getting ready to activate "Memory Overlap Detection System" and the
"Net Malloc Police" on the AIX OS in an attempt to go into furture
detail in our next dump analysis.


Does anyone know of any known issues running both versions on the same server.


:scratch:

We've run both 9i and 8.1.7 on the same machine here and had no problems.

Perhaps it's running both environments under the same oracle user that's the problem? You've got double the number of processes; memory usage; shared memory on the machines running both.

Are the user's ulimits set accordingly?

How many processes per user are you allowed under the system OS properties.

And you're sure you have plenty of free memory on the system. Perhaps checking and/or updating the MAXDATA amout for the process or environment may help.

Not much experience with running two versions of Oracle on the same server, but I have run two versions of DB2 at the same time on one server. In that instance, we had to correct some environment variables to make sure that each instance was pointing to the correct location for the binaries. Maybe there is something similar with Oracle?