Strange problem releasing inodes

OS: SunOS 5.10,Sun-Fire-V440
Oracle: 10.2.0.1.0

A couple of months ago we had an issue on this server with the OS claiming we were running out of space on the file system holding most of the Oracle files. Closer investigation showed 'some sort of problem with the inodes'. We stopped the db, the SA ran some utility, and the space usage dropped from 98% to around 50%.

A couple of weeks ago, began getting indications were were in the same situation. Files are not growing, but reported FS usage is. Another repair operation was scheduled for last night. As soon as we stopped the databases the SA reported that reported FS usage immediately dropped.

As far as database usage on this server, we have three databases. One is rather small, vanilla db backing a packaged app (Clarity/Niku); one is a physical standby running in recovery mode, and the third is an 8.1.7.4 that serves as a proxy client between the app and the physical standby in the event it becomes the primary. (Long story. Short version is app was written in Pro*C 8.1, then the source code lost. Solution is to put up an 8.1.7.4 for the app to connect to, and use synonyms and a db link to pass all activity through to the 10.2 db where the data actually resides.) We have a shell script that runs daily (via cron) to delete old archive logs a few days after they have been applied to the physical standby. Since the archivelogs are written to a new directory each day
(/db01/archive/epspd/arc/<SID>/archivelog/<yyyymmdd>, the delete is actually deleting the date-based directory, not the enumerated archivelog files:

find ${TARGET_DIR} \( -name "*" -type d \) -mtime +$RETAIN_DAYS -exec rm -rf {} \;

Any ideas?

BTW, today is my last day on this job -- starting a new job on Monday. Of course, I'll be able to follow and participate in this thread, but won't be able to work a TAR with MetaLink or actually follow up with the SA's here. But I thought this was a pretty interesting problem that was worth some discussion. Received on Fri Jan 26 2007 - 09:06:04 CST