Oracle: Unbreak my Linux Heart

There is a quick FAQ on Oracle VM , explaining the basics about Oracle new virtualization technology. For instance, basic OracleVM is free as anyone can download the binaries . Support is available on a per-socket basis, not per-core. There are also ready-made templates with Oracle Linux (OEL) 4 update 5 for both 32 bit and 64 bit VMs. You will manage VMs with Oracle VM Manager. Oracle supports their own database 10g and 11g inside OracleVM, as well as OEM, Siebel, Peoplesoft and E-business Suite. Support for Oracle RAC clusters will be available somewhere in 2008. Testing is in progress, but timing issues in RAC are very strict, so it must be thoroughly tested. The requirements for OracleVM as similar to Xen's requirements: a new/recent CPU with VTX virtualization extensions is required for running VMs with Windows. If you only run Linux, you can use older hardware as well (and a kernel supporting paravirtualization).

Today, we noticed a CPU hungry gam_server process using 100% CPU in some (32 bit) VM running Oracle Enterprise Manager. Not knowing what is did, we did some research. gam_server belongs to the gamin file alteration monitor , a part of FAM . By default, it monitors all /mnt/* and /media/* mounts. We happen to have an NFS share for common configs, sources and ISOs and such. So it makes some sense. Searching Google turns up a surprising amount hits for the same problem , dating back as far as 2004. There were some memory leaks with versions older than 0.1.7 but most problems should be fixed starting with that version. So update gamin if you don't have that version. The next issue is the default config for gamin. Two seperate solutions ( 1 | 2 ) both outline the solution: adjust the /etc/gamin/.gaminrc and set appropriate poll intervals for the file systems of your choice. In our case, we'll adjust NFS polls to every 30 seconds, ext3 to 10 secs. fsset nfs poll 30 fsset ext3 poll 10...