Oracle:How to determine the size of available shared memory of operating system while setting MEMORY_TARGET parameter for oracle instance?

Question

According to the oracle document:"The size of the shared memory should be at least the greater of MEMORY_MAX_TARGET and MEMORY_TARGET for each Oracle instance on the computer."Oracle document also suggest that we can use the command df –k /dev/shm to get the available shared memory. I got a little confuse of of shared memory while I am reading the definition of the shmall parameter: This parameter sets the total amount of shared memory pages that can be used system wide , it means that the total amount of shared memory available on the system equals to (shmall*PAGE_SIZE) So when I am going to set the value of MEMORY_TARGET, which should I go for, shmall*PAGE_SIZE or df –k /dev/shm

Answer 1

You should go for the solution that fulfills your requirements.

Both shmall and /dev/shm are configurable, so first you should to configure them, and after that, you can set MEMORY_TARGET. The default value (on Oracle Linux 7) of shmall is 4 TB, which is irrelevant for most systems. The default size of /dev/shm is 50% of the physical memory.

If you use the default settings, following /dev/shm for sizing can be a viable option, but it may be suboptimal ("Unused memory is wasted memory").

To make things more complicated, MEMORY_TARGET includes PGA, which is not shared memory.

Also, my personal opinion/practice: whenever I can, I use ASMM (sga_target/sga_max_size + pga_aggreate_target) instead of AMM (memory_target/memory_max_size). Especially since hugepages works with ASMM, but not with AMM.