ORA-00445: background process "PMON" did not start after 120 seco

I am getting the above message intermittently from the cron job which restarts the database after backup.

Environment: is AIX 4.3/Oracle 8.1.7

It appears that the startup process gets far enough to create a shared memory
segment, since, I usually see an unattached segment belonging to Oracle with a creation time corresponding to the time when my cron job tried to start Oracle. I have to delete this segment before trying to start the instance by hand.

There is one other instance on the box which always goes through its nightly backup and shutdown routine first and never has this problem.

I have not yet encountered this problem during a manual startup.

Looking in the documentation for AIX, I do not find anyplace where it specifies relationships between AIX system parameters and init.ora settings as was the case for Solaris. Am I missing something?

Thanks,
Peter Schauss
Northrop Grumman Corporation Received on Mon Mar 24 2003 - 14:38:28 CST