ORA-00490

ORA-00490: PSP process terminated with error

Cause: The process spawner died

Action: Warm start instance

Note:

The following is an example of ORA-00490.

% more alert.log:

Wed Aug 13 20:20:58 2008

Completed: ALTER DATABASE OPEN

Wed Aug 13 21:00:39 2008

Process startup failed, error stack:

Wed Aug 13 21:01:07 2008

Errors in file …/bdump/mydb_pmon_13768.trc:

ORA-00490: PSP process terminated with error

Wed Aug 13 21:01:07 2008

PMON: terminating instance due to error 490

Instance terminated by PMON, pid = 13768

% more …/bdump/mydb_pmon_13768.trc:

*** 2008-08-13 21:01:07.535

*** SERVICE NAME:(SYS$BACKGROUND) 2008-08-13 21:01:07.534

*** SESSION ID:(170.1) 2008-08-13 21:01:07.534

Background process PSP0 found dead

Oracle pid = 3

OS pid (from detached process) = 13770

OS pid (from process state) = 13770

dtp = 38000af80, proc = 3a4654618

Dump of memory from 0x000000038000AF80 to 0x000000038000AFC8

......

3A4654DF0 00000000 00000000 00000002 00000000 [................]

error 490 detected in background process

ORA-00490: PSP process terminated with error

Solution:

These errors are likely to occur when there is resource crunch (Physical /Swap Space exhaust) or other ulimit parameters are set to low value at the OS level.

The cause of the problem is that the OS can't spawn a new process; which may be related to lack of privilege or system resources (it could be any thing at the OS level). Check the OS message log file to verify any memory/swap related message logged at the time of error.

% df -h

Filesystem size used avail capacity Mounted on

swap 12G 552K 12G 1% /tmp

% sqlplus /nolog

SQL*Plus: Release 10.2.0.1.0 - Production on Thu Aug 14 14:30:36 2008

Copyright (c) 1982, 2005, Oracle. All rights reserved.

SQL> conn / as sysdba

Connected to an idle instance.

SQL> !ps -ef | grep pmon

oracle 22030 21949 0 14:30:50 pts/9 0:00 grep pmon

SQL> startup

ORACLE instance started.

Total System Global Area 612368384 bytes

Fixed Size 1980584 bytes

Variable Size 578815832 bytes

Database Buffers 25165824 bytes

Redo Buffers 6406144 bytes

Database mounted.

Database opened.

All Oracle errors in the blog can be found at: Oracle errors
All ESRI ArcSDE errors in the blog can found at: ArcSDE Errors

More Oracle DBA tips, please visit Oracle DBA Tips