ORA-600 – be careful when dynamically resizing SGA structures

If you have Automatic Memory Management turned on (sga_target > 0) and you dynamically resize db_cache_size, you might – like me – encounter an instance crash with ORA-600 [Kmgs_pre_process_request_2]. Small change – big impact! Oracle tracks this problem with Bug 6597948 and Bug 5942310. There is a patch for HP-UX Itanium 10.2.0.3. It will be fixed in 10.2.0.5 and 11g. MetaLink Note 737458.1 gives more details.

An even more obscure problem occurs when sga_target is set to an exact multiple of 4 GB: Ora-600 [Kmgs_Pre_Process_Request_6] Terminates Instance When Resizing Caches. See MetaLink 373802.1.

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