AERO Vodochody AEROSPACE a.s.
Aircraft manufacturer AERO Vodochody AEROSPACE approached us about repeated collapses of a critical server running an Oracle 11g database on Oracle Linux in VMware. At peak times, with more than a thousand connected users, the server suddenly started swapping heavily and froze completely within seconds, even though it had spare CPU capacity.
Using STATSPACK reports (no need to buy the Diagnostic Pack) and system logs, we showed that the cause was not an operating system fault but the database’s unmet memory demands. We recommended adjusting the SGA and PGA memory areas, measures against contention on the hottest objects in the shared pool, reducing unnecessary monitoring overhead and, in the long term, an upgrade to 11.2.0.4 with a fix for a known bug and moving indexes to faster SSD storage. We also pointed out inefficient application behaviour that ran a check query millions of times a day.
Based on our analysis, the customer solved the problem by adding server memory. We have a long-standing relationship with the customer – earlier we had helped them recover a corrupted Oracle database.