SAPDBA defunct processes issue on HP-UX

[Former Member]

Hi,

We encountered a typical issue with SAPDBA tool in our Production environment. This tool is called in a script scheduled in cron and it executes twice daily to check the extents of tables/indexes which could result in tablespace overflow (options c -> d and extents checked for is 5).

The script was executing fine for the last 2 years but in the last two months the script created thousands of <defunct> processes as sidadm user(cron job is with this user) in HP-UX and this had filled up the process table. The script usually executes within a minute and sends an email to the production support team but on these both ocassions it was continuously running and we needed to the kill the process manually.

Below are the version details:

R/3 Release:3.0F

R/3 Kernel:3.1I_EXT

Database:Oracle 9.2.0.8

Operating System:HP-UX 11.23

SAPDBA version 6.20

We have similar setup in our DEV and QA environments but didn't get this issue anytime. One difference here is the SAP executables including SAPDBA are on a NFS mount point in Production while they are on local filesystem in DEV and QA. Not sure if this can cause a problem randomly.

Appreciate much if anyone can confirm what could be the problem and if similar issue was encountered in any environments.

Thanks & Regards,

VDM

[markus_doehr2 · Accepted solution]

The only idea that comes to my mind is the stale NFS handle - which can be caused if the NFS was unavailable (maybe even only a short time).

You may try to find out which parent is not exiting properly by using

$ UNIX95=1 ps -eHf

Markus

[former_member524429]

Hi,

Please refer the following SAP Notes to get more information about other possible causes.

Note 153618 - BR programs generate numerous shadow processes

Note 1246652 - Child processes of a work process remain as zombie processes

Regards,

Bhavik G. Shroff